“Be very in touch with yourself; be very honest. Honesty is vital in fiction,” said Santa Barbara author Mitchell Bogatz. It’s a principle he clearly follows; in his recently published sci-fi novel, Tiny Instruments, Bogatz realistically explores philosophical concepts within the playground of a warped world of limitation through the protagonist’s naïve perspective.
The book reads like an intricate thought experiment; it plays with the possibility of genetically modified human copies called “artificials,” questioning their existence and contemplating the meaning of humanity. The thought-provoking plot follows the inquisitive clone-scientist Timothy Cottard as he rebels against Cavanagh, the restrictive research facility that manufactures and imprisons clones.
As a hybrid dystopian science-fiction novel with a coming-of-age tone, Tiny Instruments harks back to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World while also incorporating the raw innocence of Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower. “I’ve heard it called a young-adult book before, and I’ve always thought that was kind of funny because I never intended to write a specific genre,” Bogatz explained. “For me, it’s written very simply, in a childish way, because that’s the way I imagined Timothy views the world. Despite being very knowledge-savvy, he has no idea about emotions or social hierarchies.”