SIMS

A big medical thriller about genetics and Dr. Wilson’s most intriguing tale since The Keep (1981).

Wilson turns away from his evil age-old entities and other malignant beings in order to draw instead on what many of his readers really enjoy most, his medical background, to create a memorable plot while revising what may become a new word in the language: sims. Because chimpanzees share 98.5 percent of the same genes as humans, the brothers Mercer and Ellis Sinclair refine and patent a new genome for a half-human/half-simian creature they call their “product” and sell to the world as an advantageous new workforce. Sims walk upright, speak, have an enlarged but limited intelligence, have no libido, and work more cheaply even than humans in the Third World labor force. Off-hours, sims live in barracks, eat leftover human food, watch television, and are raised to have no interest in money. Labor relations lawyer Patrick Sullivan, who works both sides of the street, management and labor, is guesting at a fancy golf course when Nabb, his sim caddie, asks to see him alone. Nabb and the 20 sims who work at this country club want to unionize, not for money but for the comforts of family life. Cynical at first, Sullivan, after being insulted by a club member who has blackballed him three times, decides to take up the sims cause. The sims offer him all the money that may come in. Soon vilified, Sullivan finds himself attacked, his other clients lost, home burned, and fired by his firm. Wilson’s latest competes with David Ambrose’s The Discrete World of Charlie Monk (p. 100), a much shorter, more amusing, though less grippingly detailed—or credible—treatment of the theme of altered simian genes. We await a social satirist—a Sinclair Lewis, G.B. Shaw, or Aldous Huxley—to take up this timely subject with moral wit minus the melodrama.

Large sales loom.