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OverviewAnax is about to face her examination for the Academy, the institution which safeguards her society. The subject is close to her heart: Adam, a man whose struggle transformed the course of her country. But the examination by the panel will reveal new twists to Adam's history. Twists that will undermine Anax's assumptions about her country and who she is. But why is the Academy allowing Anax to open up the enigma at its heart? All young people will identify with Anax as she faces the most important examination of her life; she is on the brink of her future and discovering a new world. Beckett unlocks this beautifully wrought story about the human soul and artificial intelligence in an ingenious and devastating denouement. Full Product DetailsAuthor: Bernard BeckettPublisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) Imprint: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) Dimensions: Width: 13.70cm , Height: 1.80cm , Length: 20.30cm Weight: 0.272kg ISBN: 9780547225494ISBN 10: 0547225490 Pages: 150 Publication Date: 01 April 2009 Audience: Young adult , Teenage / Young adult Format: Hardback Publisher's Status: Out of Stock Indefinitely Availability: In Print Limited stock is available. It will be ordered for you and shipped pending supplier's limited stock. Table of ContentsReviews<p>More successfully than any other novel I've read recently, Bernard Beckett's Genesis epitomises the investigative ideal of science fiction. By any standards it's a short novel and at 150 pages is perhaps more truly a novella, but in a genre given to overinflated, ponderous tomes screaming out for an editor wielding a samurai sword, there's a refreshing efficiency to Becketts writing. Nothing is superfluous, nothing wasted. <p>Genesis is Beckett's eighth novel and was inspired, we're told, while the author was studying DNA at the Allan Wilson Centre for Molecular Evolution on a Royal Society Fellowship. Previously published in New Zealand in 2006, it won the 2007 Esther Glen Award and the Young Adult Fiction Category at the 2007 New Zealand Post Book Awards, and went on to ignite a bidding war in 22 countries. The novel is due to get a global release this month, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and in the UK at least will be published as two separate editions: adult and young adult.<p>The themes in Beckett's novel encourage comparison with the work of SF's most successful fictionalising philosopher, Philip K. Dick. Both authors are interested in what it is to be human but their focus is very different. Dick asks what it is to be authentically human and tended to push an ethical agenda; Beckett's concern is the nature of consciousness and that takes him beyond the human to questions of artificial intelligence. And from this perspective ethics are little more than an affectation of human ego. It's interesting and a little disturbing that Adam Forde, the character in Beckett's novel who best epitomises what Dick would classify as authentically human, is not the end-point of Beckett's philosophical investigation but the flawed and misguided genesis of the next stage of evolution.<p>Beckett crafts his story around an interview, or more accurately the academic examination of Anaximander, a young student of history who seeks to join The Academy, the highest a Author InformationTab Content 6Author Website:Countries AvailableAll regions |