Hard science fiction, a sub-genre of science fiction that is especially based on scientific plausibility and extrapolation, has experienced a renaissance from the mid-1990s onwards. The present study deals with a corpus of new hard science fiction novels by British writers (among them Paul J. McAuley, Justina Robson and Brian Stableford) published between 1995 and 2005. It offers a thematic-narratological approach. Thematically, the focus is on human genetic engineering; a topic that has only recently been fully accepted into the repertory of hard science fiction themes. This thematic focus is combined with a focus on the presentation of characters, a narrative category usually neglected in science fiction criticism. This study explores the strategies employed to create plausible characters in new hard science fiction, discusses how the physical constructedness of characters is mirrored on a textual level, and examines how the distribution of knowledge about and access to genetic engineering stratifies the population of future societies.