Stronger, Faster and More Beautiful is a 2018 science fiction novel by Arwen Elys Dayton. It explores the ethical question of how far humans will go in their pursuit of physical perfection. It was well-received critically, with Tom Shippey of the Wall Street Journal citing it as one of the best science fiction novels of 2018, and has won a number of awards.
Background
At eleven years old, Dayton watched a news story about a girl of the same age who refused medical treatment for a fatal but curable disease for religion reasons. She describes the "push and pull" of her feelings of the situation as the "touchstones" in writing the novel, professing to want to "paint myself into corners that felt just like that one. Or worse."
Dayton's interest in genetic engineering began in 2009 when she read an article in The New Yorker about synthetic biology and the scientists who were fusing together body parts to create new life. She stated in an interview: "My obsession eventually grew into Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful. But while the novel will make you think about the real scientific leaps that are happening right now, at its core it’s a series of intimate stories: Now that we can alter the course of our own evolution, how will we as a species evolve? And what will it be like to grow up, to fall in and out of love, to discover who you are, when the very essence of 'you' may be changing? Over the years read hundreds of articles and conducted numerous interviews with different researchers, including one researcher who was working to engineer mosquitoes so they couldn’t carry malaria.
Plot
Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful is composed of six interrelated stories, each set farther into the future than the last, and covering in all a time period of perhaps 150 years. The novel begins “a few years from now” with Evan and Julia Weary, semi-identical twins facing a dramatic choice about their own survival. It continues with Ludmilla, a girl who must conceal the extent to which her body has been rebuilt as prejudice against altered humans is on the rise.
Soon we meet Alexios, a boy whose genetic modifications at the embryo stage were supposed to give him super-human intelligence and open the door to a happy and successful life. Instead, his body was born deformed and his extreme intelligence has twisted in upon itself so that he spends his mental energy creating anagrams and solving useless puzzles about the world around him. Alexios has been modified with dolphin skin cells to live primarily underwater, where he oversees a flock of manatees who are growing within them human organs for transplant.
Everywhere in the world, such advances are changing the face of humanity. “As genetic manipulation accelerates beyond cosmetic enhancements and lifesaving surgeries, animal and plant genes are modified, then used to modify human beings. Limbs can be added and the mortally ill frozen until their ailments are curable. For-profit enterprises, in the U.S. especially, compete in a laissez-faire free-for-all,” according to Kirkus Reviews.
Eventually we meet Luck and Starlock, non-modified humans (known as “Protos”) who are kept on a reservation in the Colorado mountains. Humans outside their reservation have been so altered that they are, in many cases, nearly unrecognizable. When a diseases strikes these “modern” humans, the Protos must venture off the reservation and take up the reins of humanity.