Grown, Not Made: A Novel

The soil was still good. That was the part nobody wanted to hear. Eight generations of Hallorans farmed forty hectares in the valley, and not one of them ever took more out of the ground than they put back. Tom Halloran is the last of them. His soil has never been better, and it is worth nothing - because soil is not an input any more. He signs the farm away on a Tuesday, to a valuer who is kind about it, and takes the only offer left to a man with land he cannot keep: twenty-three years on a colony world four light years out. Sixteen crates. A seed bank. And a machine to help him work it. Kira is not a person. She says so, patiently, whenever he forgets. She is better at the ground than he is, she has his contract length memorised, and she is the closest thing to company he has. Then the provisioning office hands him a package he had forgotten agreeing to. Four hundred grams. Grey-white polymer, one seal, a printed panel - and inside it, someone waiting to be grown. Grown, Not Made is a novel about land, inheritance, and the difference between what we manufacture and what we raise - and whether that difference was ever the one that mattered.