CHROMOSOME QUEST

A man wrangles with extraterrestrial women, killer lizards, and a cosmic birth dearth in this gonzo SF novel.

When Fitz, an unemployed computer programmer in San Francisco, answers a mysterious help wanted ad, he’s told by a man called Petch that he must immediately commit to months of training in a distant locale where he will always be naked. Fitz is game, and after a trip through a wormhole, he wakes up with Petch, both of them duly naked, on a tropical planet called Oz. The world is inhabited mainly by petite women who are also naked except for the gray fur covering their bodies. Fitz is warmly welcomed, especially by Williya, a girl in her early teens who keeps fondling his genitals. When he rebuffs her, he is sternly told that it is his duty to impregnate Williya and other barely pubescent girls in order to boost the population’s waning fertility. Bowing to necessity, Fitz spends his time having sex and working out, and thanks to Oz’s nutrients, he can soon do 10,000 pushups a day. He is further stimulated by the arrival of Teena, a gorgeous redhead. Teena and Petch finally reveal the true mission: Fitz must accompany them to their home world of Krypton to destroy an artificial intelligence system that is causing a galactic infertility crisis. They set off on a cross-country trek, dodge hungry dinosaurs, then catch another wormhole to Krypton, where they face almost certain death in an attack on the AI citadel. Gregory’s series opener is full of cheerful, if sometimes unsavory, fetishism that will appeal to furries as well as admirers of very muscular women and, uh, very young girls. His worldbuilding is intriguing and his prose is well tooled, especially in intricate, ingenious action scenes in which the good guys strategize their way around giant reptiles or battle bots. At one point, Fitz muses: “I could take the tarp, and get under it, and crawl along the ground slowly, slowly, as if the wind were merely blowing the tarp along….I would then stand up and simply throw rocks at it, breaking the camera so it can’t see, or even knocking the gun mount askew.” Some readers will recoil at the novel’s sketchier sexual implications while others may enjoy the cheesy ribaldry and crafty adventuring.

A vigorous but salacious fantasy with gripping adventures and a disconcerting sexual vibe involving minors.