Cover Unveiled for The Games by Ted Kosmatka

This week we are treated to the cover for the Nebula award nominee Ted Kosmatka's debut The Games, which sounds a little like The Hunger Games crossed with Splice. Originally titled The Helix Game the title was shortened to just The Games so it would probably cast a wider net with readership as the story is a Thriller in addition to being hard Sci-Fi. I like the helix type in the title, but besides that I'm not a big fan of this, but I love me some debut action and I've enjoyed a couple Kosmatka shorts so I'll be there for it.  Here is the blurb:

...a riveting tale of science cut loose from ethics. Set in an amoral future where genetically engineered monstrosities fight each other to the death in an Olympic event, The Games envisions a harrowing world that may arrive sooner than you think.

Silas Williams is the brilliant geneticist in charge of preparing the U.S. entry into the Olympic Gladiator competition, an internationally sanctioned bloodsport with only one rule: no human DNA is permitted in the design of the entrants. Silas lives and breathes genetics; his designs have led the United States to the gold in every previous event. But the other countries are catching up. Now, desperate for an edge in the upcoming Games, Silas’s boss engages an experimental supercomputer to design the genetic code for a gladiator that cannot be beaten.

The result is a highly specialized killing machine, its genome never before seen on earth. Not even Silas, with all his genius and experience, can understand the horror he had a hand in making. And no one, he fears, can anticipate the consequences of entrusting the act of creation to a computer’s cold logic.

Now Silas races to understand what the computer has wrought, aided by a beautiful xenobiologist, Vidonia Joao. Yet as the fast-growing gladiator demonstrates preternatural strength, speed, and—most disquietingly—intelligence, Silas and Vidonia find their scientific curiosity giving way to a most unexpected emotion: sheer terror.

The Games will be released March 13 from Del Rey. For those unfamiliar with Ted Kosmatka check out "Diving Light" for free here, "Deadnauts" here, or "The Ascendant" here.  Also, I've got to give it up for a man who wears a swank hat like this..

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