Morphotropic

So good! It's up there with my favorite Greg Egans! In Clockwork Rocket and Incandescence style, the plot revolves around research in a setting where something fundamental is different. This time we are in a world full of body horror. Your arm can just decide to leave you. The people of this world are used to this, so the book sets off from this baseline and heads for the ever weirder.

The characters are the typical Greg Egan fare: level-headed and reasonable to the extreme. In some stories these come off as bland, but here I really loved them. Being level-headed and reasonable in this world comes off as heroic.

The book is a fun variation on the Bechdel test. I was 20% of the way through when I realized all the characters in this world are women. (In fact all creatures are female.)

I love the way clues are dropped for an important mystery. You are clued in gradually. Someone will figure it out on the first hint, someone will take five hints. No matter where you figure it out, it feels like you solved the puzzle. I suppose it's a common approach, but I found it done well here. All the flashbacks are paced well. Everything works great. There's enough drama left even for the last pages, and I loved how the conclusion wrapped up every thread. Very satisfying.

While the whole book is well made, the unique part is the research fantasy. It's not extremely technical. But it's still fun, and makes you think about how researchers have figured out similar things in our world.

A fantastic exploration of an alternative biology. In our world, the cells in an organism belong to it: attempts to directly transfer cells from one organism to another usually result in rejection by the immune system. But in this story, groups of cell (cytes) communicate with each other and with other cells to determine their course of action. Given the right signals, the cells can decide as a group to, for example, leave a person for another person which provides a better environment.

The story starts with two main characters: one who wakes up with parts of her body missing, her cells deciding to leave her for unknown reasons, leading her to become a researcher stuying how cytes communicate and decide on their roles in people's bodies. The other is a Swapper, a person who actively seeks out others to exchange their cytes, hoping to find a better combination of cytes that may eventually let them live as Flourishers, a group of people whose cytes cooperate so well that they can live for hundreds of years.

Both would eventually meet, in unusual circumstances, when the research leads to the discovery of a set of signals that can persuade the cytes to change their roles. But danger lurks, for there is another group that wants to use the research for their own purposes and are not above using murder to stop others.

Through the characters, we get to see how people live in this world, where evolution has lead to a world that looks much like our own: but on the level of cells, groups of them can decide to migrate to another body, or even change their role in the body. This has repercussions in the act of reproduction, but you'll have to read the story to discover how this happens in this alternate world.