"Wynne Cage is a clone. The only child, and other self, of the world's most fashionable drug designer. She's rich, troubled, and believes that she can survive anything. She isn't wrong.

"Wynne Cage is a rebel against her father, and she's also a freelance journalist covering a data-heist, and about to throw her lot in with the thieves. There's a lot of power and money involved. Wynne doesn't need money, but you can never have too much power. Or money.

"Wynne Cage is wildlife. In a world where bio-technology can turn a man into a boy, a boy into a dinosaur, or a woman into the Statue of Liberty, who's to say what is human and what isn't?" [jacket blurb, US pbk, 1995]

"I wasn't the only one in my family with twanked genes. My mom was a three-quarter-scale replica of the Statue of Liberty. Originally she wanted to be full-sized, and applied for a zoning variance; when they turned her down, she took them to court. Mom's claim was that since she was born human, her freedom of form was protected by the Thirtieth Amendment. However, the form she wanted was a curtain of reshaped cells that would hang on a forty-two-meter-high ferroplastic skeleton, clearly subject to building codes and zoning laws. Eventually they reached an out-of-court settlement.

"One thing Mom and the town agreed on from the start: no tourists. Sure, she loved publicity, but she was also very fragile. In some places her skin was only a centimeter thick. Chunks of ice falling from her crown could punch holes in her.

"Mom had been bioengineered to be pretty much self-sufficient. She was green not only because she was photosynthetic. She lived on a yearly truckload of fertilizer, water from the well, and 150 kilowatts of electricity a day.

"I think Mom meant well, but she never did understand me. Especially when she talked to me with her greeter bioremote.
"'Peter. How are you, Peter?'
"'Tired.'
"'You poor boy. Let me see you'. She held me at arm's length and brushed her fingers against my cheek. 'You don't look a day over twelve. Oh, they do such good work -- don't you think?' She squeezed my shoulder. 'Are you happy with it?'" --James Patrick Kelly (extract from Wildlife , US pbk, 1995).

"Kelly has combined the virtues claimed by the humanists with the technological possibilities that are the cornerstone of cyberpunk in a book that delves into the very core of what it means to be human". -- (in Publishers Weekly ).