Transhuman

De: Ben Bova

Narrado por: Stefan Rudnicki

A scientific thriller by six-time Hugo Award winner Ben Bova

Luke Abramson, a brilliant cellular biologist who is battling lung cancer, has one joy in life: his 10-year-old granddaughter, Angela. When Angela is diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor and given less than six months to live, Luke wants to try a new enzyme, Mortality Factor 4 (MORF4), that he believes will kill Angela's tumor.

However, the hospital bureaucracy won't let him do it because MORF4 has not yet been approved by the FDA. Knowing Angela will die before he can get the treatment approved, Luke abducts her from the hospital with plans to take her to a private research laboratory in Oregon.

But Luke is too old and worn down to flee across the country with his sick granddaughter, especially with the FBI on their trail. So he injects himself with a genetic factor that stimulates his body's production of telomerase, an enzyme that has successfully reversed aging in animal tests.

As the chase weaves across the country from one research facility to another, Luke begins to grow physically younger, stronger. He looks and feels the way he did 30 or 40 years ago. Yet his lung cancer is not abating; if anything the tumors are growing faster.

And Angela is dying.

©2014 Ben Bova (P)2014 Blackstone Audiobooks

great story

I really liked just about every aspect of the story including the main character's view on the economics of his discovery. I really wished the underlying technology for life extension were based on SENS research or pretty much anything except the obviously incorrect views about telameres and aging. It's an outdated and scientifically false assumption that telameres have anything to do with the aging process. Aging is the consequence of the damage caused by metabolic processes. Besides that one issue, this story is great and I really loved the main character's renegade attitude.

Interesting premise

It's easy to bond with these characters and some might think the premise far fetched. But I've written a lot about health care and it would be short-sighted not to believe that money rules the world.

Enter Text Here

Plot and characters are good enough for an exciting read. But, the promised sci-fi wasn't there. Instead, a blackmail chase that rivals Dirty Harry. I was disappointed in 7 year old Angela, the center of the plot and a cancer patient. She was about as exciting as grass growing. I couldn't figure out why the book was called "Transhuman" as there was nothing "trans" about it.

Swing and a miss

I love many of Bova's books, but in this novel Bova commited the worst sin in literature: He Bored the reader.
*Bland characters that were not well fleshed out.
*Repetitive dialogue
*poor pacing
*A plot that read like a flat coke.
This book reads like a very early rough draft, its almost as if Bova started writing an outline but became disinterested and only published because, well I dont know what could have possibly went through his mind to think this was a good idea.
it almost feels like he is just tired of writing, which is sad because he wrote several of my favourite science fiction novels.
I really hope he finds his spark again.

Predictable

Ehhhhhh, wellll...if you like angst. Not for me. The main character was a boring personality in a field that I expected to be exciting. Expectations not met.

Outdated Tech, Outdated Views on Women

If you’re nostalgic for a time when payphones were high-tech and every female character was reduced to her bust size or emotional instability, then Transhuman might hit the mark. For the rest of us, it reads like a relic. The story pushes a dated, toxically masculine worldview where every woman is either a love interest, a problem, or both—and defined solely by male desire. The men are stoic geniuses; the women are emotionally erratic and sexualized.

The tech references (Skype, pay phones, physical credit card swiping) land this book squarely in the early 2000s. That makes it a strange choice for a book claiming to be about the future of humanity. In 2025, it feels archaic—both culturally and technologically.

Unless you’re over 60 and pining for traditional gender roles with a side of “visionary” tech from 2003, this one’s probably a skip.