When I first started really reading again in 2022 it was because It’d read Tustomu Nihei’s BLAME! and I really like how the super powerful robotic creatures were often largely biological and I started looking for books like that.
So I looked up a bunch of biopunk books. But they were all really just about ethical or philosophical stuff like “*is it ethical to genetically modify somebody while they sleep even if it cures their cancer and they can now speak an alien language*” or “*I was genetically modified to be able to breathe deep underwater but I also have PTSD so now I’ve turned into a fishperson*”.
Yeah cool whatever. That’s not what I wanted.
I wanted cool monsters born from mutations. Stuff like William Burkin in Resident Evil 2, or Tetsuo in Akira, or even the Space Marines in WH40k. And so far the only example of this I could find is Scott Westerfield’s Leviathan and that book is sold out everywhere.
by syntaxGarden
1 Comment
Longshot: Maybe try The Tainted Cup. None of the mutations in humans are on the scale of the cited works and it’s a murder mystery instead of an action adventure story, but it’s unapologetic about its mutants and the leviathans attacking the empire imply that something grotesquely mutagenic is happening in the ocean and things will only get more like Tetsuo as time goes on.