Simply Human: Baen Books,
August, 2000. Assaulted by random chemicals, solar
radiation, and genetic manipulation, the human gene pool was falling apart.
The solution: simplify it, making it redundant and self-correcting, then
in a thousand years, when the planet was clean again, change it back.
In the meantime, "Simplified" humans would keep civilization going. But
after two thousand years, the automated monitors still register intolerable
mutation rates.
Achibol the Sorcerer, dilapidated cyborg troubleshooter, is repairing
them one by one, but someone something doesn't want him to succeed.
The urchin Benadek, Achibol's apprentice, only wants good food and a warm
place to sleep.
But nothing is ever what it seems including Benadek and nothing
human is ever ... simple.
Bright Islands in a Dark Sea, Del Rey Books, 1993. An archaeological SF novel set in the far future, when the height of high tech is an oxcart. But once Mankind had reached for the stars: what had happened? Only the sinister alien "gods" of the Church of Pharos know. They claim humans are incapable of piloting ships in the hostile interstellar environment. But antiquarian Yan Bando has discovered an ancient wrecked starship, with human skeletons at the controls, and he can prove the ship's last planetfall but one was definitely not Earth...
Past
and Present...