Beta (review)

On the luxurious island of Demesne, there are beautiful, emotionless clones for everything—cleaning, companionship, factory work—all created from Firsts who had to die in order for them to exist. Elysia is a beta, part of a test line of cloned teenagers (previously assumed to be too unstable for cloning), and she’s bought by the Governor’s wife to be a surrogate daughter (a role with plenty of creepy Stepford overtones). Through her new siblings and fellow clones, she starts to learn about the wider world and her place in it—and also begins to develop actual feelings and even memories of her First. Meanwhile, she gets to know gorgeous surfer Tahir and comes to realize that he, too, is a clone, illegally created by his parents when First Tahir died a year earlier. Cohn introduces readers to a world brimming with excess, hypocrisy, and chilling expediencies through Elysia’s blinkered eyes, revealing layer after new layer of horror as Elysia probes ever-deeper into the mystery of her existence. The time-honored sci-fi trope of a manufactured being striving to become more human is powerfully reimagined here, and Elysia’s literalism as she navigates this disturbingly familiar future underscores her innocence while adding an edge of humor to the social critique. The meditations on bioethics and the nature of humanity make this a strong complement to Mandanna’s recent The Lost Girl (BCCB 9/12) or Farmer’s stellar The House of the Scorpion (BCCB 11/02). Readers will warm to the complex characters and haunting world-building, and they’ll eagerly await the next volume in Cohn’s proposed series.