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A review by kynan
Changeling by Chris Kubasik
3.0
TL;DR: Anti-bigotry lecture wrapped up in an intellectual infodump-esque introduction to the Shadowrun universe.
TL: Peter Clarris is the fifteen-year-old son to a well-off, if somewhat sociopathic and potentially nihilistic, professor of medicine. The year is 2039, the place is Chicago and the Night of Rage is just about to happen. The book opens with Peter coming to consciousness and discovering that he's undergone a somewhat surprising "goblinization", or, as this book puts it, "ingetisization". There's a lot of pseudo-medical jargon in Changeling. Well, I think that it's pseudo-medical. The deal is that Peter and his father are both very, very clever people and Peter was well on his way to following in his father's biological-medical footsteps when he was flipped into a troll. The book's conceit is to hold onto that thread and really try to tell the story of why things happened the way they did. So, "ingetisization" (I guess from the Latin ingens) is the process by which homo sapiens sapiens ("pure" humans) transforms into homo sapiens ingentis (trolls). We also learn the terms homo sapiens pumillonis (dwarves) and homo sapiens nobilis (elves) (the precursor metahumans in the Shadowrun world - with examples of both being born to human-parents as part of the Unexplained Genetic Expression starting in 2011) as well as homo sapiens robustus (orcs) and homo sapiens ingentis (trolls), of which the latter two only started appearing in 2021 when 10% of the human population suddenly "goblinized". Peter's goblinization-case, in 2039, is quite odd, and isn't explained.
The entire book is basically couched around Peter's desire to "cure" himself of his trollishness and it involves several detours into plausible (to me, but I'm no geneticist
TL: Peter Clarris is the fifteen-year-old son to a well-off, if somewhat sociopathic and potentially nihilistic, professor of medicine. The year is 2039, the place is Chicago and the Night of Rage is just about to happen. The book opens with Peter coming to consciousness and discovering that he's undergone a somewhat surprising "goblinization", or, as this book puts it, "ingetisization". There's a lot of pseudo-medical jargon in Changeling. Well, I think that it's pseudo-medical. The deal is that Peter and his father are both very, very clever people and Peter was well on his way to following in his father's biological-medical footsteps when he was flipped into a troll. The book's conceit is to hold onto that thread and really try to tell the story of why things happened the way they did. So, "ingetisization" (I guess from the Latin ingens) is the process by which homo sapiens sapiens ("pure" humans) transforms into homo sapiens ingentis (trolls). We also learn the terms homo sapiens pumillonis (dwarves) and homo sapiens nobilis (elves) (the precursor metahumans in the Shadowrun world - with examples of both being born to human-parents as part of the Unexplained Genetic Expression starting in 2011) as well as homo sapiens robustus (orcs) and homo sapiens ingentis (trolls), of which the latter two only started appearing in 2021 when 10% of the human population suddenly "goblinized". Peter's goblinization-case, in 2039, is quite odd, and isn't explained.
The entire book is basically couched around Peter's desire to "cure" himself of his trollishness and it involves several detours into plausible (to me, but I'm no geneticist