C.T. Fitzgerald
Independently Published           
$4.99 e-book , 11.99 paperback plus freight

Altered features sci-fi short stories that center on new possibilities and consequences for humanity’s decisions on technology and the quality of life. It creates disparate and inviting stories that should give rise to debates in book club and discussion groups about the values and directions humanity is on the cusp of choosing, that could irrevocably affect how freedom and the future plays out.
 
Take the opening story, ‘Inevitable Antiphony’, for example. Here, an unusual dialogue between human and robot, presented in a unique two-column format, surveys the boundaries of artificial and biological life, considering the moral and ethical choices in life, death, and what lies in between.
 
The dialogue is structured to slow the mind’s tendency to read too quickly, injecting pauses that, though they may seem artificial at first, result in emphasis and enlightenment that is usually harder to achieve in the standard paragraph form.
 
From the moral concerns of human-generated creation processes to the types of transformation that will be produced by AI, the conversation takes on deeper undertones of reflection that will delight by its form as well as its content.
 
In contrast is ‘Made to Order’, in which a futuristic result of genetic engineering leads to some extraordinary and frightening traits. These prompt the narrator to admit that his more-than-human semblance actually represents a being incapable of exhibiting or feeling the emotions that make for a human being.
 
What, exactly, is this new creation? By his own admittance, the narrator has no feelings about his life, purpose, or those who are deciding his future:
 
“…at this point in my life, I had no idea about what I wanted to do, and to make things worse, there was nothing that motivated me, no emotion, no great need or fear, no drive to pursue anything specific. I was, quite literally, a blank slate that someone had to fill in, and that someone would never be me. No problem.” 
 
Deemed a legal and social nightmare, can one who is ‘barely human’ be tailored, altered, or trained to re-integrate into society without dire consequences?
 
C.T. Fitzgerald raises tough moral and ethical questions in each of these cases of altered states—questions that will especially intrigue and delight book club participants as well as philosophy groups considering what makes us human.
 
Altered is thus highly recommended reading not just for its entertainment value, but for its series of examinations that, libraries will find, lend perfectly to broad recommendation to patrons interested in the intersection of sci-fi, technology, philosophy, and the future of human affairs.