Skinned
The novel is about a woman named Lia Kahn, who is sort of dead. It's like a number of other books in which the main character had died, then was revived in some manner. The events take place in the future at a time when genetic manipulation before birth has become a reality. Lia realizes she's in a lab or some sort. She can think, but the only thing she can move are her eyelids. She has been skinned; her original body discarded (it was in very bad shape form the accident), her brain was removed, analyzed, and a reconstructed form of it was transplanted into what is essentially an android body, and the same type of thing has been done to a few others. She feels nothing emotionally. The body she now has will eventually need to be replaced, and her memories will be downloaded again. She is not at all happy with what has been done to her. Later she meets another skinner, a girl named Sasha. It comes up in a conversation the two have that there had been an atomic war. Mecca and Jerusalem were both destroyed. The war resulted in massive pollution, and science had worked to deal with that. When she finally gets to go home, she's greeted by protesters who call her an abomination. They're a religious extremist group called the Faithers. The entire Mideast (Iran, Iraq, etc.) is gone due to the war. In the U.S., California is mostly gone, due to an earthquake, and D.C. is gone due to a tidal wave. There is a system set up that updates her memories into storage, so if the constructed body she is in were to be destroyed, a new version would be created, complete with her latest updated information. She later meets with her former boyfriend, and that meeting doesn't go well. Her first day of school reinforces how different she is from the others, and how she has lost her commanding social standing she once had. (The future social scene is not nice. Drugs of various kinds play a bigger role than they do now. Clothing is hi-tech. There's a greater divide between the rich and the poor, and the rich regard the poor ever more negatively than they do now. It's not a pretty world Lia lives in.) Lia loses her boyfriend and she becomes a social outcast. She attends a support group for people like her, but things don't go well there, either. Auden is a human boy who sort of befriends Lia. His father, though, is a Faither and hates Lia. Her former boyfriend is now having sex with her sister. She later encounters a group of skinners. (There's also a description of what happened to many U.S. cities, and what the ones that survived were now like, which is pretty grim.) Auden gets badly hurt and wants nothing more to do with her, and she has to decide what to do with her existence; continue to try to fit in with humans, or leave and live with skinners? This is a very grim book about a very, very grim future. It's also a book about hate, how humans are so quick to hate anything that is different or has a different outlook on life than they do. Finally, it's also a book about exactly what makes a human a human. How much can you take away of the human organic components and still have something left that would be thought of as “human?” It's a grim, but thought-provoking book. |
