Terry Brooks Reviews: The Games by Ted Kosmatka

As I’ve said before, science fiction always starts with a ‘what if.’

I can only imagine what that ‘what if’ was for The Games by Ted Kosmatka.

Did it start with the Olympics? Did it start with some people wanting to allow disabled athletes into the games with their prosthetics? Or did it come to be from science playing with genetic mutation and addition to our genome? What would happen to the species if science attempts to make it stronger at the DNA base of what makes us human? How would that affect the world?

And more importantly, what consequences would it have?

Ted Kosmatka has answered these questions and more in The Games.

Here is a bit more about it:

This stunning first novel from Nebula Award and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award finalist Ted Kosmatka is a riveting tale of science cut loose from ethics. Set in an amoral future where genetically engineered monstrosities fight each other to the death in an Olympic event, The Games envisions a harrowing world that may arrive sooner than you think.

Silas Williams is the brilliant geneticist in charge of preparing the U.S. entry into the Olympic Gladiator competition, an internationally sanctioned bloodsport with only one rule: no human DNA is permitted in the design of the entrants. Silas lives and breathes genetics; his designs have led the United States to the gold in every previous event. But the other countries are catching up. Now, desperate for an edge in the upcoming Games, Silas’s boss engages an experimental supercomputer to design the genetic code for a gladiator that cannot be beaten.

The result is a highly specialized killing machine, its genome never before seen on earth. Not even Silas, with all his genius and experience, can understand the horror he had a hand in making. And no one, he fears, can anticipate the consequences of entrusting the act of creation to a computer’s cold logic.

Now Silas races to understand what the computer has wrought, aided by a beautiful xenobiologist, Vidonia João. Yet as the fast-growing gladiator demonstrates preternatural strength, speed, and—most disquietingly—intelligence, Silas and Vidonia find their scientific curiosity giving way to a most unexpected emotion: sheer terror.

Sounds great, right?

It’s gotten great reviews everywhere and it has even captured the attention of a major New York Times bestselling author in Terry Brooks! Terry has read a number of fantasy and science fiction novels in the last few months but this is the one he loved from page one. Here is his review:

Terry Brooks Reviews The Games by Ted Kosmatka

The choice was easy this month. I just finished a new book called THE GAMES by a writer named Ted Kosmatka. No, it is not a riff on THE HUNGER GAMES. It isn’t even fantasy. It is a SciFi Thriller about a future in which the Olympic Games includes an event pitting genetically manufactured creatures against each other in blood sport reminiscent of ancient gladitorial contests. What happens when the perfect fighting machine becomes a threat to its creators? Nothing good, you can be sure. A page turner with a new take on the future of the Olympics should genetic manipulation suddenly become fashionable.

There you have it!

The Games by Ted Kosmatka is in fine bookstores now!