Review: Athena's Choice

Athena's Choice by Adam Boostrom
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Athena's Choice is a novel that depicts a utopia or dystopia, depending upon your point of view (or possibly your gender). Set in the far future, the world has spent decades without men after a mysterious Y-Fever kills all males and a far smaller number of females. A young woman named Athena Vosh becomes drawn into a criminal investigation when the security around the Lazarus project, which is dedicated to reviving the males of the human race, is breached. Athena has been having odd dreams or visions, with of all things, what seems like a man, sending her information about the Lazarus Project and its lead scientist, Dr. Grace Antares. This is particularly odd because Athena is an artist, not a scientist, and she's a teenage girl.

Cutting back in forth in time, we see the evolution of the Y-Fever events, and the lives of Grace, Athena's lover and friend Nomi, and a police investigator, Captain Valerie Bell, who enlists Athena's help after being directed to her by an AI called the Core. (The Core meets with Athena and maddeningly tells her that she has something to say to her but can't tell her unless Athena knows what to ask.) First, Valerie and Athena look into the breach of the Lazarus Project at the Helix research labs, and then, ultimately, Nomi helps Athena unlock a huge piece of the Lazarus and Y-Fever puzzle. And like I said, utopia? Dystopia? It's hard to say.

Some aspects of the book are rather fascinating such as the idea of Happiness Profiling, which plugs into people's brains and figures out what would soothe them or bring them happiness. The inventor of the method was horrified with the results. Let's just say that men and women are made happy by very different things in Athena's world. That said, I wish all the characters had had greater depth to them. The book is a slender 278 pages, and I think with a bit more length, we could have explored characters like Grace, Eve, and Valerie to build a richer story. There were also other aspects of the book which were too simplistic for me, however. Namely the fact that the book takes a very, very binary view of the world, and also doesn't take into account things like chromosomal variations. What if a man is XXY or XXXXY? What about XO women? What about trans individuals? (It also neglects any depth of discussion of sexual orientation, which most evidence points to as being biological and which affects brain development.) The book had a subterranean Minority Report feel to it, in which people are judged guilty before they've actually done anything. It's also interesting that this view of a feminist world is written by a man. Boostrom certainly gives us a view of a skewed feminist utopia. What is the cost of utopia? Is utopia ever real? A thought-provoking, if imperfect, novel.

Alex Ford does a fine job narrating the audiobook, adding dimensionality to the characters.

I received a Digital Review Copy of this novel from the publisher via Edelweiss, in exchange for an honest review.

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