The Cure by Eve Smith (book review).

A couple of weekends back I met with a bunch of old friends that I got to know a quarter of a century ago, when we were all in our late twenties or early thirties and were living and working in London. It was lovely to see them all, but we did seem to spend a depressingly long time comparing our various health issues. I suppose that’s one of the joys of growing older.

That’s not a problem for the characters in Eve Smith’s new dystopian SF novel, ‘The Cure’, though. Set in a near-future Britain, genetic medicine has conquered ageing. The idea might sound great, but it turns out that the consequences are far from rosy.

Eve Smith is a British author of speculative thrillers. I was lucky enough to meet her at a literary festival in the Home Counties a couple of years ago, when she was promoting her previous novel, ‘One,’ a story about the potential consequences of rampant climate change on personal freedoms. I enjoyed ‘One’ hugely, so when the chance arose to review her new book, I grabbed it with both hands.

The story is set roughly a century into our future, although quite a few chapters are told as flashbacks to earlier periods so that we can see how the world became the way it is.

The chapters alternate between the perspectives of two protagonists. The first is Ruth. She is 115 years old, but the core of her story starts eighty years earlier, when her ten-year-old daughter, Lettie, died of a rare genetic disorder. Having trained as a geneticist, Ruth dedicates the next several years to finding a cure for Lettie’s illness. Eventually, she does. Amazingly, that same genetic therapy turns out to be of much wider importance, as it is the basis for a vaccine, called the ReJuve, which prevents age-related illness and physical decline, as long as it is taken once a year. You’ll still die eventually, but you should have a long and healthy life until then. Given the savings this generates in health service costs, most countries make the ReJuve available at low cost or for free.

A long and healthy life isn’t enough for some people, though. One of Ruth’s former colleagues, Professor Erik Grundleger, is obsessed by the idea of immortality. He rushes to develop Ruth’s vaccine further, creating the so-called SuperJuve, a one-off injection that boosts life expectancy to much greater levels. Unlike the ReJuve, this treatment comes with a price tag that only the super-wealthy can afford. Those who take it are soon dubbed ‘Supers’ as they get older, richer and ever more powerful.

Wind forward a few decades, and the shortcuts taken by Grundleger in his creation of the SuperJuve come home to roost. The treatment can have negative impacts on mental health in the long term. Given how rich and powerful some of the Supers now are, what follows is almost inevitable. A world leader who is also a super causes a global calamity when psychosis sets in.

Realising that Supers pose a significant threat, most national governments prohibit the SuperJuve treatment and attempt to compile a list of existing Supers. When many of them use their wealth to change their names, faces and entire identities to evade the law, the authorities decide to get tough.

Enter our second protagonist, Mara. She’s 25 years old and one of the best investigators for Omnicide, the UK government’s enforcers of the anti-super law. Mara’s job is to track down British Supers, arrest them and bring them home. Once positively identified, any Supers over the newly mandated maximum age of 120 years are executed by lethal injection.

Ruth and Mara team up to pursue Grundleger, and Mara leverages Ruth’s intimate familiarity with the man to outwit him. However, Grundleger has been actively researching an even more radical project than the SuperJuve, and he consistently manages to stay ahead of them. Can they catch him before he plays god once again?

From the first page to the last, “The Cure” kept me captivated. The first paragraph starts with: ‘It looks like a collage I did at school. … But this is a brain. Splattered and leaching into paving cracks— I defy you not to read on. The rest of the book is a rollercoaster ride of ups and downs, leading to some spectacular twists near the end, before a satisfying resolution.

The worldbuilding is also excellent. Smith creates a believable UK of a century hence, blighted by the environmental and social damage caused by a rising population. There is a shortage of housing, which puts any green space at constant risk of becoming a construction site. Youth unemployment is rampant because the older generations feel no need to retire from work until much later in life. Yet, at the other end of the age scale, state monitoring of what individuals do once they’re over a century old, part of the enforcement of the new mandatory maximum life span of 120 years, inevitably makes the last decades of life feel increasingly like something out of ‘1984’.

Of course, if the reader doesn’t care about the characters, none of this will matter. Thankfully, Smith is just as gifted at characterisation as she is at worldbuilding and plotting. We learn a great deal about Ruth’s life, including the tragedy of losing a young daughter and the triumph of winning a Nobel Prize for her research. She emerges as a fully rounded and deeply sympathetic person, so it’s easy to cheer her on. Mara is younger and more guarded, so it takes us longer to understand her backstory. Ultimately, though, she turns out to be just as three-dimensional as Ruth. Even Erik Grundleger, the villain of the piece, is shown to have a valid motivation for his life choices, although he uses it to justify some deeply unpalatable decisions.

This is Eve Smith’s fourth novel. As with the previous three, it explores speculative futures that could potentially come to pass if we’re not careful. In this case, the central idea of the book is that advances in the science around ageing could create huge problems as well as provide benefits. To me, this seems extremely relevant and timely. You only have to watch the TV for a few minutes to see adverts for all sorts of expensive anti-ageing beauty products. If someone created a genuine cure for ageing, it’s difficult to believe that there wouldn’t be huge demand. Manufacturers could charge exorbitant prices so that if matters were left entirely to the free market, the poorest in society would be likely to miss out. If you’re interested in exploring how such a scenario might play out in practice, ‘The Cure’ is just the book for you. I loved it.

Patrick Mahon

April 2025

(pub: Orenda Books, 2025. 316 page paperback. Price: £ 9.99(UK). ISBN 978-1-916788-54-1).

check out websites: www.orendabooks.co.uk and www.evesmithauthor.com