Duncan, Dave -- Pock's World
An odd little book from a small press. Having read it, I can see why
it wasn't picked up by Duncan's usual publishers; it's not quite up to
his standard. In a galactic sector dominated by the autocratic (but
not particularly despotic) We-Own-The-FTL Company, somebody turns up
evidence of human genetic engineering. The Company quickly assembles a
crack team of civilians (the priest, the journalist, the
industrialist, the politician) to check it out before they apply their
usual penalty of sterilizing the planet. There's a lot of tossed-off
social-biological assumptions (the engineered humanoid species must
be destroyed, because two races cannot possibly coexist, even though
it's explicit that every colony does some gene-fixing to make its
members more comfortable on their planet) and then some vaguely creepy
underage (consensual) sex. The author should have kept the priest
character and written him a better novel.
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