7th Son: Descent

I gave this one a lower rating when I first listened to the podcast, but in retrospect I'm not quite sure why - I think maybe I had gone into it thinking it was one kind of story, and then found out it was entirely a different kind, and that affected my rating? Reading it in print, though, revealed an amazingly enjoyable story.

7th Son is best described as a technothriller about cloning and memory, although doing so is kind of like describing Battlestar Galactica as “a space opera with robots”; it's descriptive, but completely ignores what's special about it. The story is simultaneously a thriller, a sci-fi story, an existential horror piece, a family drama, a tale of conspiracy, an adventure story, and most of all a crackin' good read. Fitting for a tale of 7 strangers who are brought together to find out that not only are they all clones of the same man, but that that man is a madman who has already murdered a president in step one of a larger plot for world dominatin. Hutchins shows a real talent for melding those different aspects of the story into a larger whole, as well as for creating seven protagonists who are unique individuals, but still recognizably from the same genetic code and early life history.