The Green Evolution

The Green Evolution: When Light Became Life: A Novel About the End of Hunger

A groundbreaking debut novel that reimagines the future of human evolution

Dr. Liana Marquez has spent fifteen years researching the impossible: teaching human cells to photosynthesize like plants. When her breakthrough finally succeeds, she believes she's about to end hunger forever. Her first volunteer, former Marine Jonah Reyes, can survive on sunlight alone, his green-tinged skin processing light into energy with unprecedented efficiency.

But solving humanity's oldest problem creates entirely new ones.

As photosynthetic enhancement spreads, society fractures along biological lines. Enhanced humans work longer hours, require no food infrastructure, and exhibit cognitive abilities that give them a significant competitive advantage. Traditional humans face economic obsolescence while watching their most basic shared experience, eating together, become meaningless to half the population.

Families divide. Communities collapse. Children grow up as different species.

When teacher Isla Rivera becomes the first enhanced human to go public, her classroom revelation sparks a global transformation that spirals beyond anyone's control. Agricultural economies collapse. Restaurants close. The rituals and relationships built around food, humanity's oldest form of connection, begin to disappear.

Meanwhile, a resistance movement emerges, led by those who believe that food, hunger, and shared meals are fundamental to human nature. As violence escalates and governments struggle to maintain order, both populations face a chilling realization: they may be witnessing the end of humanity as a single species.

Spanning fifty years of consequences, The Green Evolution follows multiple generations through humanity's greatest transformation:

• Scientists grappling with unintended consequences

• Families torn apart by evolution itself

• Children born into a world their parents can barely understand

• Communities fighting to preserve what it means to be human

Drawing on real research in genetic engineering and synthetic biology, Sally Whitton's debut novel combines hard science fiction with deeply human storytelling. This thought-provoking exploration of enhancement, identity, and progress poses profound questions about the future we're building, and whether we'll recognize ourselves when we arrive.

Perfect for readers of Kim Stanley Robinson, Liu Cixin, and Becky Chambers—speculative fiction that combines scientific rigor with emotional depth.

"We sought to end hunger and instead discovered that hunger itself was more essentially human than we realized." —Dr. Liana Marquez