Pandora's Sisters

by Michael Stephen Fuchs

"You want to know who gave you your immortal soul? You want a personal relationship with God? Well, we found God. We're all up in God. We've got God's private number. And so do imprinted a hundred trillion times - once in every living cell in your big dripping corpus."
So says a woman with a pole-axe pressed to her neck, and the solution to the entire mystery of human existence clutched between her palms. 

Two weeks earlier, she was just your average British expat with a PhD, working in Silicon Valley as an artificial intelligence designer for ultra-violent video games, spending the evenings hanging out with her pet chimp - and wondering how something as weird as human consciousness could have evolved through mere Darwinian selection. 

But when a mysterious and disconcertingly attractive behavioral geneticist, and a hotshot cryptologist with strange religious affiliations, stroll into her life, she begins looking for answers in the backwaters of the human genome - the 97% written off by scientists as "junk DNA". 

And soon after, when men in very strange hats come looking for her hard drive, shooting first and never really asking any questions, she finds herself on the run - pursued by multiple squads of heavily-armed religious zealots, the Feds, and worse. All seek to obtain, or to suppress forever, the key to the revelatory stretch of DNA known as  The Pandora Sequence . The outcome of their race to control this explosive secret will forever alter how humanity regards itself - that is, if anyone lives long enough to tell the tale.

310 pages, Hardcover

First published June 7, 2007

About the author

MICHAEL STEPHEN FUCHS is author of the #1 bestselling epic ARISEN series of special-operations military ZA novels, which have repeatedly been Amazon #1 bestsellers in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction, #1 in Dystopian Science Fiction, #1 in Military Science Fiction, #1 in War Fiction, and #1 in War & Military Action Fiction, as well as Amazon overall Top 100 bestsellers. The series as a whole has sold over 1.5 million copies. The audiobook editions, performed by R.C. Bray, have generated over $5 million in revenue. He is also author of the D-Boys series of high-tech special-operations military adventure novels, which include D-Boys , Counter-Assault , and Close Quarters Battle (coming in 2026); as well as the existential cyberthrillers The Manuscript and Pandora’s Sisters , both published worldwide by Macmillan in hardback, paperback and all e-book formats (and in translation). He lives in London and blogs at www.michaelfuchs.org/razorsedge. You can follow him on Facebook, X, Instagram, TikTok, or by e-mail.

Reviews

[Tracy Smyth · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was disappointed with this book. It was slow at the start, picked up a bit in the middle and then went weird at the end. I would not call it a thriller

[Marius · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. It could be that I was in the right mood. But you don't often get a suspense thriller set in an IT world that's very convincing for IT people. Furthermore, the author clearly went through his own existential crisis earlier in life so he still has deep empathy for people having the "existential flu". He manages to address a rather serious topic in a way that's both entertaining and thought-provoking (at least initially). Part of the appeal (and motivation to finish the book) is the odd change that he may be onto something interesting - he's also good a very good understanding of basic genomics and neuro-science (evidence that during his existential crisis he also researched Steven Pinker's). It's a little arrogant I guess to assume that you can play with such a serious issue and not come across as a wanker, but he manages to balance this with very good suspense and action scenes. I'm sure Ridley Scott stole a few ideas here for Prometheus. It's a good lesure read for a holiday or an off weekend.