Ratings17
Average rating4
“The ancestors are out there…you have to believe me.” From acclaimed author Scott Sigler—New York Times bestselling creator of Infected and Contagious—comes a tale of genetic experimentation’s worst nightmare come true. Every five minutes, a transplant candidate dies while waiting for a heart, a liver, a kidney. Imagine a technology that could provide those life-saving transplant organs for a nominal fee ... and imagine what a company would do to get a monopoly on that technology. On a remote island in the Canadian Arctic, PJ Colding leads a group of geneticists who have discovered this holy grail of medicine. By reverse-engineering the genomes of thousands of mammals, Colding's team has dialed back the evolutionary clock to re-create humankind’s common ancestor. The method? Illegal. The result? A computer-engineered living creature, an animal whose organs can be implanted in any person, and with no chance of transplant rejection. There's just one problem: these ancestors are not the docile herd animals that Colding's team envisioned. Instead, Colding’s work has given birth to something big, something evil. With these killer creatures on the prowl, Colding and the woman he loves must fight to survive — even as government agents close in to shut the project down, and the deep-pocketed company backing this research proves to have its own cold-blooded agenda. As the creators become the prey in the ultimate battle for survival, Scott Sigler takes readers on the ultimate thrill-ride—and offers a chilling cautionary account of what can happen when hubris, greed, and madness drive scientific experimentation past the brink of reason.
Reviews with the most likes.
A team of research scientists have been illegally working on isolating the genome of the common ancestor of all mammalian life, with the goal of creating chimera creatures that can grow organs that can be harvested for human use.
As one might expect, all goes horribly wrong, and the research scientists soon find themselves hunted by the creatures, just as the largest storm of the year comes barreling through.
Equal parts Jurassic Park, The Thing, and Repo: the Genetic Opera, you might get a certain sense of familiarity when reading Ancestor, but Sigler's strong characterization and dark sense of humour are on full display here, which makes for a very enjoyable read.
Lots of things to like. Simple, fast and formulaic. Read it fast and forget it as fast!