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Gene is a thriller novel by Stel Pavlou (born 1970), published in 2005 in England by Simon & Schuster. [1] It is published in several languages with some title changes. The Italian edition has the title La Cospirazione del Minotauro (The Minotaur Conspiracy). The novel is about a fictional New York detective, James North, who in the process of hunting down a criminal, uncovers a genetics experiment to unlock past lives through genetic memory, therefore achieving a kind of immortality. In so doing North discovers his own origins, that of a soldier from the Trojan War who is reincarnated seven times through history, forced to confront his nemesis each time, all for the loss of his one true love.
Cyclades (born circa 1300 BC)
Incarnations of Cyclades
Athanatos (born circa 1500 BC)
Incarnations of Athanatos
Detective Martinez
Cassandra Dybbuk
Doctor Shepherd
In dealing with genetic memory, Pavlou has drawn on both the nature of lineage, and the nature of self. Several characters all stem from the same source, and so as their memories become unlocked during the course of the novel, they each identify with being the same person at a distant point in history. The question of identity then becomes fundamental to the plot. If each character shares the same memories are they a reincarnation of that original person, or merely an echo?
The novel is further complicated in that it is told backwards, using a Police procedural as the structure of the novel, memories are unlocked in the form of flashbacks, each flashback delving further and further back in time over the course of 3000 years.
Told in alternating first person and third person, the novel is divided into a prologue and seven "books", the seven trials of Cyclades.
The opening page begins with the first 27 lines of the Human Genome. Thereafter the prologue lays out the death of Cyclades during the Trojan War, and makes it clear that his death is merely the beginning of the journey. Told in first person, Cyclades, a Greek warrior, is mortally wounded. A Sybil forces him to have sex to continue his line, whereupon he dies for the first time in the book.
Book One, shifts to third person and jumps to the year 2004. In New York City Detective James North has been called to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to deal with a mentally unstable man who has run amok amid the exhibits.
Gene has been listed in the Daily Mirror's Top 10 books to look out for in 2005.
The Judgement of Paris is a story from Greek mythology, which was one of the events that led up to the Trojan War and in later versions of the story to the foundation of Rome.
A first-person narrative is a mode of storytelling in which a storyteller recounts events from that storyteller's own personal point of view, using first-person grammar such as "I", "me", "my", and "myself". It must be narrated by a first-person character, such as a protagonist, re-teller, witness, or peripheral character. Alternatively, in a visual storytelling medium, the first-person perspective is a graphical perspective rendered through a character's visual field, so the camera is "seeing" out of a character's eyes.
Lost Boys (1992) is a horror novel by American author Orson Scott Card. The premise of the novel revolves around the daily lives of a Mormon family, and the challenges they face after a move to North Carolina. The story primarily follows the family's troubles at work, church, and the oldest child Stevie's difficulty fitting in at school, which lead to him becoming increasingly withdrawn.
The A.B.C. Murders is a work of detective fiction by British writer Agatha Christie, featuring her characters Hercule Poirot, Arthur Hastings and Chief Inspector Japp, as they contend with a series of killings by a mysterious murderer known only as "A.B.C.". The book was first published in the UK by the Collins Crime Club on 6 January 1936, sold for seven shillings and sixpence (7/6) while a US edition, published by Dodd, Mead and Company on 14 February of the same year, was priced $2.00.
Sue Taylor Grafton was an American author of detective novels. She is best known as the author of the "alphabet series" featuring private investigator Kinsey Millhone in the fictional city of Santa Teresa, California. The daughter of detective novelist C. W. Grafton, she said the strongest influence on her crime novels was author Ross Macdonald. Before her success with this series, she wrote screenplays for television movies.
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is a 2003 science fiction book, the first novel by Canadian author and digital-rights activist Cory Doctorow. Concurrent with its publication by Tor Books, Doctorow released the entire text of the novel under a Creative Commons noncommercial license on his website, allowing the whole text of the book to be freely read and distributed without needing any further permission from him or his publisher.
Rogue Trooper is a science fiction strip in the British comic magazine 2000 AD, created by Gerry Finley-Day and Dave Gibbons in 1981. It portrays the adventures of a "Genetic Infantryman" named Rogue and three uploaded minds mounted on his equipment who search for the Traitor General.
A narrative work beginning in medias res opens in the midst of the plot. Often, exposition is bypassed and filled in gradually, through dialogue, flashbacks or description of past events. For example, Hamlet begins after the death of Hamlet's father. Characters make reference to King Hamlet's death without the plot's first establishment of said fact. Since the play is about Hamlet and the revenge more so than the motivation, Shakespeare uses in medias res to bypass superfluous exposition.
Lady in the Lake is a 1947 American film noir starring Robert Montgomery, Audrey Totter, Lloyd Nolan, Tom Tully, Leon Ames and Jayne Meadows. An adaptation of the 1943 Raymond Chandler murder mystery The Lady in the Lake, the picture was also Montgomery's directorial debut, and last in either capacity for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) after eighteen years with the studio. Montgomery's use of point-of-view cinematography and its failure was blamed for the end of his career at MGM.
The Dybbuk, or Between Two Worlds is a play by S. Ansky, authored between 1913 and 1916. It was originally written in Russian and later translated into Yiddish by Ansky himself. The Dybbuk had its world premiere in that language, performed by the Vilna Troupe at Warsaw in 1920. A Hebrew version was prepared by Hayim Nahman Bialik and staged in Moscow at Habima Theater in 1922.
Clayface is an alias used by several supervillains appearing in American comic books published by DC Comics. Most incarnations of the character possess clay-like bodies and shapeshifting abilities, and all of them are adversaries of the superhero Batman. In 2009, Clayface was ranked as IGN's 73rd-greatest comic book villain of all time.
Guardian is a DC Comics superhero introduced in April 1942 by writer/artist Joe Simon and artist Jack Kirby.
The CYCLADES computer network was a French research network created in the early 1970s. It was one of the pioneering networks experimenting with the concept of packet switching and, unlike the ARPANET, was explicitly designed to facilitate internetworking.
A flashback is an interjected scene that takes the narrative back in time from the current point in the story. Flashbacks are often used to recount events that happened before the story's primary sequence of events to fill in crucial backstory. In the opposite direction, a flashforward reveals events that will occur in the future. Both flashback and flashforward are used to cohere a story, develop a character, or add structure to the narrative. In literature, internal analepsis is a flashback to an earlier point in the narrative; external analepsis is a flashback to a time before the narrative started.
There are a wide range of ways in which people have represented the Trojan War in literature and the arts.
Steven Savile is a British fantasy, horror and thriller writer and editor living in Sweden. His published work includes novels and numerous short stories in magazines and anthologies.
Cross is James Patterson's 12th novel featuring his most famous character, Alex Cross. It was released in 2006. This novel was also released in some markets under the title Alex Cross. This book is followed by Double Cross.
Ilium/Olympos is a series of two science fiction novels by Dan Simmons. The events are set in motion by beings who appear to be ancient Greek gods. Like Simmons' earlier series, the Hyperion Cantos, it is a form of "literary science fiction"; it relies heavily on intertextuality, in this case with Homer and Shakespeare as well as references to Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu and Vladimir Nabokov's novel Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle.
1906 is a 2004 American historical novel written by James Dalessandro. With a 38-page outline and six finished chapters, he pitched it around Hollywood in 1998 for a film by the same name, based upon events surrounding the great San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906.
The Expanse is a series of science fiction novels by James S. A. Corey, the joint pen name of authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck. The first novel, Leviathan Wakes, was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2012. The complete series was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Series in 2017. It later won, following its second nomination for the same award in 2020.