If they do, then huzzah, it kicks the whole endeavor up a notch in my estimation, and I’ll probably recommend the book to more people and with more enthusiasm. I don’t need my dumb adventure stories to also have magnificent character development.

But at that moment Alexa wanted to be her. Even if she lived to be four hundred years old, she’d never know the joys and sorrows of motherhood. That look in the young mother’s eyes… She could feel the urge to be a mother. Never felt what it was like to be a woman. Almost fifty years old, and she looked not a day over twenty-five. They’d made her the way she was, and in many ways she was grateful.

Here’s an internal monologue from the preposterously attractive Alexa, right after she chucks the chin of a fat little baby she meets in the BTC halls. Since she’s the only female character we’ve encountered so far, this is already annoying. But in fact, she was so attractive it was difficult for Grady to take his eyes off her, despite his absurd predicament. She wore a tailored pantsuit and crisp white blouse–normal business attire. She was incredibly beautiful, fair complected, with short jet-black hair and lapis lazuli blue eyes.

That part is all fine.)Īlong the way, he encounters the following woman, who was genetically designed by the BTC to be young and beautiful forever (as well as good at fighting, and fatally attractive to all men everywhere because chemicals): Sounds fun, right? (That’s not the thing either. When Grady refuses (he’s a Maverick, remember), they ship him off to an isolated torture-prison called Hibernity, whence he must find a way to escape and bring True Science back to the world. A Shady Organization called the Bureau of Technology Control (BTC) orders him to join them in concealing this scientific innovation from the rest of the world, because the World Can’t Handle the Truth. Influx is about a man called Jon Grady who is such a Maverick that he invents a thing called a gravity mirror. If you say “sci-fi retelling of The Count of Monte Cristo,” I am going to read that book even if I have to go to several different libraries to get it, which is how Influx, by Daniel Suarez, became one of the oldest books on my TBR spreadsheet, which is how I came to be reading it in the car on a recent road trip.

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