Reefsong by Carol Severance is one of my all-time favorite stand-alone science fiction novels. I quoted from it in my second graduate school application essay. The underlying premise is a chilling extrapolation of some current sociopolitical trends. The other book that approaches this scenario (only loosely) that comes to mind is The Cold Cash War by Robert Asprin.

Reefsong is set at some indeterminate time in the future. The lead protagonist is Angela Dinsman, a cultural anthropologist who works as a troubleshooter for the United Nations. I admit, the thought of the UN with any sort of clout seems like a joke or wishful thinking (unless you subscribe to the extreme-right conspiracy theories that the UN is going to take over the United States any day now). Her job has largely involved resolving environmental disputes as the natural resources of the world dwindle and disappear. Who is the usual client that hires her services? World Life--the single transnational corporation that has gobbled up everything to become the sole business and landowner in charge of agricultural production in the world. And what does the world look like? Thanks to antiabortion and anticontraception policies of earlier generations (pushed by conservative corporations), the planet abounds with teeming billions of people existing on the edge of starvation, subsisting on mass-produced algae and the like from World Bank for survival.

This book is far enough in the future that humans have the ability to travel vast distances through wormholes to colonize other planets. One of those is a water world that is the principal producer of the algae that so much of humanity depends on. However, to survive on Lesaat, human colonists are outfitted with gills and accompanying webbed hands. Not surprisingly, most of the colonists come from island cultures on Earth: Polynesians, Micronesians, Hawai'ians, Japanese, etc.

In the opening chapter, Angela Dinsman is seriously injured while trying to rescue a fire lookout during a wildfire in the Rockies. She wakes up with gills and new hands to meet Pua, a waterworld child whose changes were manipulated in utero by her geneticist mother. Pua is now an orphan in custody of World Life, her parents suddenly dead, and their scientific breakthrough that could revolutionize food supplies and save billions is missing. Angela Dinsman is essentially coerced into going to Lesaat to investigate in her capacity as UN troubleshooter.

In many ways, this book is a celebration of island cultures, marine life, and traditional ecological knowledge. It is also a fairly riveting sociopolitical and psychological drama. It is also an effective portrait of the end game of corporate greed and its human costs. Great story, great scenery, great dialogue, generally good characters, both funny and serious. It is a very original work that stands out in a field of so many derivatives.

The only quibbles are two. First, the opening scene and the premise that forest management operates in automatic fire suppression mode. Decades of that policy in real life have shown its very real flaws and limitations. It's hard to swallow in some sort of distant future, even if the forests are classified as CO2 farms. Second, I love all of the science fiction that entails such knowledge and mastery of genetics and physiology that we can just pick whatever physical structures we want from the animal kingdom and incorporate them into the human genome and body. Gills? No problem. Octopus hands? Sure. I mean, I loved the short-lived Dark Angel television series, which had a very similar sort of biological premise, but still, it's not really that easy or likely. To date, the only real transgenic modifications we've engineered involve very simple biochemical pathways (bioluminescence, cold hardiness, herbicide tolerance, etc.), not fairly complex physical structures. All of these stories completely ignore such processes as pleiotropy and epistasis and complex interactions between the individual and the environment and among various scales from genes to cell to whole organism. ( )