Nancy Kress is the author of thirty-three books, including twenty-six novels, four collections of short stories, and three books on writing. Her work has won six Nebulas, two Hugos, a Sturgeon, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and has been translated into two dozen languages, including Klingon. In addition to writing, Kress often teaches at various venues around the country and abroad, including a visiting lectureship at the University of Leipzig, a 2017 writing class in Beijing, and the annual intensive workshop Taos Toolbox, which she teaches every summer with Walter Jon Williams.

Top photo by Mary Grace Long

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Pub Date January 10, 2023

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Dr. Caroline Soames-Watkins’s star has been on the rise. But when she accuses a superior of sexual misconduct, a Twitterstorm results that upends her career. With few professional options, and an impoverished sister with a profoundly disabled child to support, Caro is willing to consider a strange and unexpected proposal from her great-uncle, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Samuel Watkins. 
 
The elder Watkins changed the world and made his fortune after patenting an over-the-counter cure for the common cold. He has since invested untold sums of money to build a medical facility in the Caribbean. Sam Watkins is sickly and in urgent need of a surgeon to perform a unique procedure developed at his island compound. But the procedure isn’t to cure the cancer surely killing him, it is meant to offer new life of a truer kind.  
 
Helped in his mission by the eminent physicist George Weigert and the young tech entrepreneur Julian Dey, Sam Watkins has gone far beyond curing the body to develop a technology that could solve the riddle of mortality for the soul. Caro understands that the brain-mapping work being done on the island has great scientific value, but she refuses to grant Weigert’s other claims, which seem outlandish to her. However, enticed by the chance to secure financial stability for her family, she puts aside her profound misgivings, and joins a mission she can’t bring herself to believe.

She never expects that her choice will lead her into so much danger—or into love.

Publishers Weekly Starred Review

Lanza, a pioneer in the fields of stem-cell and cloning science, makes his mind-blowing theory of biocentrism—“that the universe springs from life, not the other way around”—the focus of this brilliant Crichtonesque thriller, coauthored with SF veteran Kress… a page-turning plot complete with betrayals, violent deaths, and difficult moral choices. This is perfect for fans of Blake Crouch.