Clade: Clade: A Novel

by Mark Budz

Book Overview

IT'S A POST-ECOCAUST WORLD. WELCOME TO IT. In the San Jose of tomorrow, all of nature is gengineered--from the warm-blooded plants to the designer people. But even in a rigidly controlled biosystem,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0553586580
• ISBN13: 9780553586589
• Release Date: December 2003
• Publisher: Random House Worlds
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 4.2" x 7.0"

Customer Reviews

Well I liked it.

I don't think this book is going to win any major awards but it is nice to read a fresh prospective every once in awhile. This is a fun little novel interesting concept even it is a bit hazy in the middle with a fast narrative flow. It is very rare to read one of these near future cyber-punk novels that doesn't deal humanity outside the solar system and I would like to see more books dealing with Ringo but I don't think thats ever going to happen.

Don't put your nose up at this debut effort!!

"Clade" is an excellent first novel from Santa Cruz resident Mark Budz. The novel, set in a near-future world recovering from an ecological disaster, gives a refreshing and original outlook on the future of bioscience. In this future, you are assigned a certain biochemical signature which basically forces you to remain in your specially designated part of the world or suffer from an intense allergic reaction. Neat idea, right? The plot centers on a young man trying to move up in the world, who hopes through hard work and some luck he can get out of the ghetto clade (San Jose of all places!) into which he was born and achieve the middle class American Dream! Now, this wouldn't be a very interesting novel if all the kid did was work hard and remember his boss' birthday, so you have to read the rest of book to find out what happens. I really enjoyed it. The future society was very believable and very frightening in many ways. The main character was also very believable and very likable. You want to see this kid have a happy ending, despite all the problems he encounters. Now, having been to San Jose many times, I can totally understand why the author chose this city for his setting, but many residents may not approve of how the city is portrayed! Other then that, a great debut effort and I enjoyed it more then the author's third novel, "Idolon", which was also very original, but lost me at the end.

Addictive as hell!

If you're simply passionately into SF you will love this book. I can't speak for people who write irrelevant reviews (uhm- how is 375 pages "a short book"???), but I think anyone who can appreciate a truly inventive vision of a dystopian future will love it. The world that Budz has created is so meticulously detailed and thought out that you never need to suspend your disbelief. I can't wait to read the sequel.

A fine, gritty Cal-biotech hard-SF future. 4.5 stars

CLADE is set 50 years after a catastrophic ecological collapse, the 'ecocaust', a human-caused mass-extinction right up there with the five worst in Earth's history. Civilization was saved by heavy-handed reengineering of the biosphere, but at a cost of billions of lives lost, and a tightly-regimented social setup. Budz does a nice job of worldbuilding in CLADE, and handles the ambiguous costs and benefits of new technology very well indeed. Decent hard-SF that makes a serious attempt to extrapolate the medium-term future is never in oversupply. This is my favorite kind of SF, so I was very pleased to discover CLADE. There are, unsurprisingly, some first-novel rough spots here, particularly with the thriller-style plot, which suffers from some heavy-handed auctorial hammering-to-fit -- but, hey, you'll happily put up with a few warts for the technically-sweet payoffs in CLADE. Budz is clearly an author to watch. A sequel, CRACHE, is promised for Fall 2004. I'm looking forward to it. Happy reading! Pete Tillman Read complete review: tinyurl.com/57pc3

A warning as well as a great story

Planet Earth is not a self-sustaining orb anymore ever since the ecocaust occurred causing the destruction of humongous land masses all over Terra; killing untold billions. Scientists work feverishly to save theplanet as the ice caps rise, causing the oceans to deepen, drowning islands and shorelines. The ozone layer has more holes than Swiss cheese so that many inland communities are domed.Populations are confined to certain geographical regions known as ecotectural zones or Clades and bioengineered sensors prevent one community from interacting with another. Genetically engineered plants and trees pump badly needed oxygen in the air and people like Rigo is a sytech working for Neogenetic's and does his best to work within the system, until he understands that through bioengineering and the use of pherions, the powers that be control what one thinks and feels. Now Rigs works within the system to change it.Thanks to mankind's greed, stupidity and blindness, Earth has destroyed itself. Now instead of starting over, the in crowd is rebuilding the world the way it used to be only now they are in charge. There are such strict class and caste structures that artificial wars exist between people. Everyone knows they are being drugged into docility but very few care and those that do are the true heroes of the CLADE.Harriet Klausner