Space Opera Fans discussion

There’s a huge number of space opera books where a key feature is gene tweaking or other modification of humans. Far fewer involve genetic modification of plants and animals. In the Treecat trilogy A Beautiful Friendship by David Weber, Stephanie’s mother does this to plants to improve their ability to thrive on Sphinx, but I wouldn’t call it a key plot point.

Mirabile by Janet Kagan definitely has this as crucial to the story. This story takes place on a colonized planet. When stocking the ship, Earth officials were concerned that some plants and animals might be lost and they decided on redundancy. They packed genes for other plants or animals into the seeds and frozen embryos, set so that if the right environmental context is found, the extra genes would surface. They did include instructions on how to turn the extra genes on or off, but the instructions were lost on the voyage. So the settlers end up dealing with surprises, and sometimes dangerous ones, like the kangaroo rex.

Do you know of a good space opera that includes GMO of plants or animals?

I'd say it's more "Future War" than "Space Opera", but the comic strip Rogue Trooper (from the pages of sci-fi anthology comic 2000AD) stars a GMO protagonist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_T...

Clarification: I’m asking for GMO plants and non-sapient animals, or what had been non-sapient animals anyway. So The Uplift War by David Brin would fit what I had in mind.

Fair enough. My apologies.

I want to say there are tons of examples, such as Robinson’s Mars series, but nothing that specific is coming to mind. That’s probably because it’s usually not the focus of the story.

Although... doesn’t Gerrold ‘s War Against the Chtorr series (A Matter for Men) feature alien invaders trying to xenoform Earth with their plants? I haven’t read them and it’s hard to tell from the description.

Trike wrote: "Although... doesn’t Gerrold ‘s War Against the Chtorr series (A Matter for Men) feature alien invaders trying to xenoform Earth with their plants? I haven’t read them and it’s hard to tell from the description."

There is no specific alien race in those books, it's an entire alien ecosystem that invades the Earth. Well worth reading although he never finished the series.

The Celta series by Robin D. Owens. While the main books take place after settlement on planet there are prequel short stories that take place on the space ships. Plants and animals are both deliberately GMO and modified by the alien environment.

What about the Fluency series by Jennifer Foehner Wells? There seems to be some kind of genetic problem there.