"The year is 2057. John Firth Baker, the first genetically engineered visual artist, is murdered at the age of nineteen. He leaves behind a body of drawings, paintings, and sculptures, culminating in the thirteen seminal works known to the world as Baker's Dozen. Within a decade of his death, Baker becomes a cult figure. A retrospective of his work is mounted at the Virtual Museum of Manual Art.

The Song of the Earth is his biography - organized around reproductions of his art and based on journals, e-mails, newspaper clippings, and interviews with those who knew him.".

"Baker grows up in an age transformed by technology. Twenty years earlier, his mother had her fertilized egg illegally endowed with genes that would give him potential to become a visual artist. His is a world in which genetic profiles, space travel, and gender reassignment are common. Global warming has altered the environment. A planetary war between women and men rages, familial structures have shattered, and new religions contend with the old.".

"Yet human needs remain the same. Baker is obsessed with sex, he searches for love, he seeks immortality, first through religion and then through art. Inspired by his dreams, nightmares, and fantasies, Baker rejects digital technology and teaches himself to make images with his own hands. When he reveals the secret of his gift, his life is in danger."--BOOK JACKET.