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More reviews by Tammy Ho
Readers may purchase reviewed books from Paddyfield.com, Asia's online bookseller.North American readers may prefer to buy US editions from Powells.com.
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Project Integrens by John Biggs
It's commonly believed that humans only utilise an average of 2-5% of the potential brain capacity. One can only wonder what it would be like if that percentage were maximized. Erstwhile Hong Kong resident JOHN BIGGS poses an even more provocative hypothesis in PROJECT INTEGRENS: what if our brains were integrated and our thinking and feeling conjoined?
John and Liz, psychologists, lovers, 'Earthlings', are told by two field agents from a planet some 300 light years away that their brains are split between their lower and higher parts and that they are intrinsically defective. Despite this unflattering appraisal, John and Liz are nevertheless recruited to planet Kozlar to help expand its gene pool, since the Kozlans, an evolved version of homo sapiens, have exhausted all potential samples from other homo species.
These Kozlans are decisively different from Earth people. To begin with, their sexual organs conveniently only appear during the Season when they mate in extravagant and home-group fashions. Also, their language has four dimensions: words, grammar, speed and pitch (a level of complexity even exceeding Cantonese). Kozlans have also integrated thinking and feeling, and hence are Whollies or homo integrents, unlike Splitties at an altogether inferior stage of evolution.
After some initial hesitation, John and Liz agree to take on the challenge, while Kalen and Franji engage themselves with more field study on Earth to discover same-sex relationships, company politics, coffee and even music.
On a planet some might describe as utopian -- diseases have been conquered, reason precludes irrational emotion, everything is functional and hygienic -- what John and Liz witness is far from satisfying. All living beings on Kozla, it seems, are classified in hierarchies reminiscent of those in Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?: Whollies are supreme, animals such as the chardas are appreciated and the sjenden, whose cranial capacity is about 80% that of Earth people, are treated as wretched slaves. Human such as John and Liz are therefore genetically neither fish nor fowl. Worse, the couple realize too late that they might need to be biologically corrected and genetically engineered to be fit for the breeding purpose.
Unlike Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and other dystopian science fiction, Biggs has our contemporaries -- 9/11 is even referred to once -- traveling light years to visit another planet. The dual realities of Earth and Kozla are contrasted for insight into the present and a probable future in which brain development could be engineered and manipulated.
'Project Integrens' is the Kozlans' attempt to collect promising samples from other homo species to cross-breed. And Biggs integrates elements from several genres -- science fiction, romance, satire and occasional soft-core erotica -- to create an exciting story of adventure, space travel, humanity and the quest for the truth.
Tammy Ho
08/02/2007
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