The description Emma Geen's debut novel, THE MANY SELVES OF
KATHERINE NORTH, intrigued me from the start.
Katherine "Kit" North works in research for ShenCorp to
discover how animals live in their environments. To do
this, she can "jump" into a created body of a fox or spider
or whale through a neural connection and exist as that
animal: hunting, playing, sensing, the same as they do.
Sounds exciting doesn't it? Geen's writing during the
scenes in which Kit is in another body really pop, too.
Poetry in motion as it were.
Buckley, her partner, keeps an eye on her body while she
embodies the animals and his voice grounds her to her human
reality as well. But there is more going on at Shen Corp as
Kit discovers when the head boss ask her to serve as poster
girl for their tourism concept.
Kit doesn't think tourism, which would all newbie jumpers
to inhabit the bodies of wild animals, is such a good idea.
Then she finds out what more ShenCorp has in the works.
Geen uses different time lines to tell her story: present,
with jumps back to different animal experiences and
flashbacks to times in her childhood. The shifts can be a
bit confusing, but it doesn't take too long to establish
oneself in a new setting. Kit has depth; it's easy to
empathize with her highs and lows and her confusions and
questions.
Being able to transfer consciousness into an animal may
have been written about by others in the past, but Geen's
handling of this concept is special. I was shocked to find
out she was not a zoologist at the end of the story in her
notes; she's done scads of research to describe Kits'
experiences in each creature. Where the story let me down a
bit is that it slowed in some places and how Kit went about
find answers to some of her questions didn't jive at all
times. Overall, Geen is a talented writer, and I'd
definitely read future books of hers. THE MANY SELVES OF
KATHERINE NORTH is quite impressive for a debut novel with
such tricky material.
Nineteen-year-old Kit works for the research department of
Shen Corporation as a phenomenaut. She's been
“jumping”--projecting her consciousness, through a
neurological interface--into the bodies of lab-grown animals
made for the purpose of research for seven years, which is
longer than anyone else at ShenCorp, and longer than any of
the scientists thought possible.
She experiences a multitude of other lives--fighting and
fleeing as predator and prey, as mammal, bird, and
reptile--in the hope that her work will help humans better
understand the other species living alongside them.
Her closest friend is Buckley, her Neuro--the computer
engineer who guides a phenomenaut through consciousness
projection. His is the voice, therefore, that's always in
Kit's head and is the thread of continuity that connects her
to the human world when she's an animal. But when ShenCorp's
mission takes a more commercial--and ominous--turn, Kit is
no longer sure of her safety.
Propelling the reader into the bodies of the other creatures
that share our world, The Many Selves of Katherine North
takes place in the near future but shows us a dazzling world
far, far from the realm of our experience.
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