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EXTINCTION is based on the real effort (now close to success) to resurrect the woolly mammoth and other extinct megafauna using genetic engineering. Here's the description of the novel:
Erebus Resort, occupying a magnificent, hundred-thousand acre valley deep in the Colorado Rockies, offers guests the experience of viewing woolly mammoths, Irish elk, and giant ground sloths brought back from extinction. When a billionaire's son and his new wife are kidnapped and murdered in the Erebus back country by what is assumed to be a gang of eco-terrorists, Colorado Bureau of Investigation Agent Frances Cash partners with County Sheriff James Colcord to track down the perpetrators.
As killings mount and the valley is evacuated, Cash and Colcord must confront an ancient, intelligent, and malevolent presence at Erebus, bent not on resurrection―but extinction.
The novel is based on actual science. The "de-extinction" of the woolly mammoth is very close to reality. In my extensive research into this project by a company called Colossus, I came across a scientific idea that was so dangerous and unspeakable--and yet being openly discussed by apparently reasonable people
--that it gave me, in a flash, the central, terrifying idea for the novel.
EXTINCTION is not science fiction. The science in it is real, it is here, and it is already being deployed, possibly for dark ends.
"The real problem with humanity," the brilliant Harvard biologist Edwin O. Wilson wrote, "is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous."
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