Anatomically Wrong

by L. Eschedor

After a century of chaos, technology has finally reached the point where people no longer need to work just for basic survival. Instead, everyone is free to engage in intellectual pursuits, the arts, or… other pasttimes. Join Theo Northford, a member of the first generation to grow up in this age of plenty, as he tries to find his way through life over the course of three years. Unfortunately, there are a number of obstacles that stand in his way, such as a growing transhumanist movement, as well as his own social ineptitude. 2300 CE Theo has never had a girlfriend, and he’s starting to realize that this fact is not likely to change anytime soon. Or ever, unless he does something drastic. From his usual solitude, he delves into the world of artificially controlled biosynthesis, neural writing, and AI modification, in an attempt to create a living, thinking girlfriend from scratch. As his project begins to go off the rails, Theo must question how far he’s willing to stray from human norms in order to find romantic fulfillment. 2301 CE Having succeeded at creating his perfect, yet quite inhuman girlfriend, Theo is finally able to enjoy his life with Koharu. Theo finds himself working to keep his lover a secret from the human world, leading him into a double life split between Koharu and a society he fails to meaningfully connect with. While Koharu is more than happy to be Theo’s everything, she knows that he needs to learn to connect with others if he’s going to live a fulfilling life. Concerned for his well-being, Koharu searches for a way to ease Theo into interacting with his peers. 2302 CE When an acquaintance calls upon Theo for help with making his own homemade girlfriend, Theo feels like he finally has an opportunity to forge a relationship with a like-minded individual. Unfortunately, a freak accident forces Theo to transfer Yuri’s mind into the body of his a laughably-proportioned teenage girl. While Theo tries to balance keeping his own secret with smoothing over Yuri’s transition into her new life, a new unknown appears in the form of Maiden, a heavily pregnant dancer who promotes the government’s reproductive programs with her performances. Theo, who has only just begun to open up to people, finds himself being drawn into conflict as society struggles to determine where to draw the line on bodily modification.

295 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 15, 2017

Reviews

[DJay · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love books by this author, but this one had me a lil meh. It was a good book, but Theo was a bit too much for me. Totally lacked all self confidence in himself despite the fact that he created a life and also created something on his own in high school that the world's corp's couldn't create with a slew more funds than he had. Dude literally took a home grown AI and implanted inside of a person and somehow he thinks that he's not really good at anything. The boy suffers from extreme social awkwardness and it just gets annoying the longer you read the book despite the fact that he manged to save his friends life and achieve a measly 55% better rate than ALL of the hospitals around him. I also didn't like the fact that his friend Yuki was constantly being dogged despite the fact that HE GOT HIT BY A DAMN TRAIN AND WAS FORCED TO CHANGE HIS BODY FROM MALE TO FEMALE. All people could talk about was how much of a perv he was the entire book. Dude got NO slack the entire time. I liked the premise of this book. I also liked the way the plot went, I just wasn't a fan of the execution. For instance Theo is responsible for the deaths of a SLEW of people, but all he can do is think about what would happen if these people got their way. He straight up made it so that a group of people who wanted to transfer their minds into other bodies could not do so by setting off what are the equivalent of chaff grenades to stop ALL communications from happening thus leading to the death of a slew of people all so he could keep his secret. That's what did it in for me for this book. I understand that his fear motivated him to do what he was doing, and the fact that the people were in fact terrorist, but it still remains that he just shrugged off what he did. Dude is a psychopath. I mean he did cry about it, but that's IT. I dunno. I just couldn't agree with Theo or the people in the class. I really wish the book had been about Yuki instead. As much of a pervert that he was, he was at least honest with who he was and his motivations, unlike Theo.