The other three are less so and two of them are deemed failures in terms of BioPerfect’s ambitions for them. Fern is proud of her attributes in the field of communications – creating mediastreams – and is happy to lose touch with her parents and her brother. There they are house mothered by Margaret, herself crafted by BioPerfect to be an infertile carer. Mine were told I would be beautiful as well if they selected the menu option BioPerfect wanted.” They encourage our parents or bribe them.

They finetune and shape and sculpt and then they have us – a prototype for a possible next version. They might want to test the success of a teacher with more imagination. Sometimes it’s just to fill a gap in the market, sometimes they want to try out a new model.

Data is currency and the air is full of mediastreams, moving images that cannot be avoided without data.įern, the protagonist, is one of four girls who by virtue of their worker parents winning Lotto, have been genetically enhanced and admitted to Halston, a school run by the BioPerfect corporation for the genetically enhanced daughters of rich parents. Ordinary workers live in little flats with shared facilities in grimy towers and the underclass in shanties around the base of the towers, queuing for casual work or begging from the marginally less underprivileged. Nation-states are gone, corporations are in control, privileged employees live in company towns with manicured surrounds and clean air. The setting is a near-ish future, in an unnamed location, after ‘the Breakdown’, and is well imagined. Special is a good story but suffers in my mind, not from being didactic exactly, but from too obviously putting up issues for kids to discuss. When I was growing up I went straight from Enid Blyton and Richmal Crompton (all right, I still read William books) to adult fiction, as I’m sure most of you did too (not counting one blogger with Sweet Valley High addiction!), maybe some Ivan Southall and ES Ellis and, when they came out, Harry Potter. I have, and vaguely remember reading, Blain’s first two, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not sure how I came into possession of Special, I just noticed it one day sideways in a bookshelf, which is what I do with books I’m waiting to read, one of a stack handed to me by an ex-wife or daughter I guess. 2016 has also seen the release of Blain’s eighth, Between a Wolf and a Dog, and also the unhappy news that she has brain cancer ( SMH story). Special (2016), YA science fiction, is Australian author Georgia Blain’s 7 th novel and her second ‘Young Adult’.

Too Close To Home by Georgia Blain