Designer Genes: Tales of the Biotech Revolution

by Brian Stableford

  BORGO PRESS BOOKS BY BRIAN STABLEFORD

  Alien Abduction: The Wiltshire Revelations * Asgard’s Conquerors (Asgard #2) * Asgard’s Heart (Asgard #3) * Asgard’s Secret (Asgard #1) * Balance of Power (Daedalus Mission #5) * The Best of Both Worlds and Other Ambiguous Tales * Beyond the Colors of Darkness and Other Exotica * Changelings and Other Metaphoric Tales * The City of the Sun (Daedalus Mission #4) * Complications and Other Science Fiction Stories * The Cosmic Perspective and Other Black Comedies Critical Threshold (Daedalus Mission #2) * The Cthulhu Encryption: A Romance of Piracy * The Cure for Love and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution * Designer Genes: Tales of the Biotech Revolution * The Dragon Man * The Eleventh Hour * The Face of Heaven (Realms of Tartarus #1) * The Fenris Device (Hooded Swan #5) * Firefly: A Novel of the Far Future * Les Fleurs du Mal: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution * The Florians (Daedalus Mission #1) * The Gardens of Tantalus and Other Delusions * The Gates of Eden * A Glimpse of Infinity (Realms of Tartarus #3) * The Golden Fleece and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution * The Great Chain of Being and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution * Halycon Drift (Hooded Swan #1) * The Haunted Bookshop and Other Apparitions * In the Flesh and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution * The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels * Journey to the Core of Creation: A Romance of Evolution * Kiss the Goat: A Twenty-First-Century Ghost Story * The Legacy of Erich Zann and Other Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos * Luscinia: A Romance of Nightingales and Roses * The Mad Trist: A Romance of Bibliomania * The Mind-Riders * The Moment of Truth * Nature’s Shift: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution * An Oasis of Horror: Decadent Tales and Contes Cruels * The Paradise Game (Hooded Swan #4) * The Paradox of the Sets (Daedalus Mission #6) * The Plurality of Worlds: A Sixteenth-Century Space Opera * Prelude to Eternity: A Romance of the First Time Machine * Promised Land (Hooded Swan #3) * The Quintessence of August: A Romance of Possession * The Return of the Djinn and Other Black Melodramas * Rhapsody in Black (Hooded Swan #2) * Salome and Other Decadent Fantasies * Streaking: A Novel of Probability * Swan Song (Hooded Swan #6) * The Tree of Life and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution * The Undead: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution * Valdemar’s Daughter: A Romance of Mesmerism * A Vision of Hell (Realms of Tartarus #2) * War Games * Wildeblood’s Empire (Daedalus Mission #3) * The World Beyond: A Sequel to S. Fowler Wright’s The World Below * Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction * Xeno’s Paradox: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution * Year Zero * Yesterday Never Dies: A Romance of Metempsychosis * Zombies Don’t Cry: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  Copyright © 1991, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2004, 2013 by Brian Stableford

  Published by Wildside Press LLC

  www.wildsidebooks.com

  DEDICATION

  For Gardner Dozois, without whose generous participation the campaign would have expired on the drawing-board.

  INTRODUCTION

  All the stories in this book—and many others—were written as elements of an eccentric propaganda campaign that I have now been waging for nearly two decades. I was persuaded of the necessity of embarking upon this particular crusade by the arguments set out in J. B. S. Haldane’s speculative essay Daedalus; or, Science and the Future, which was first presented as a lecture at Cambridge University on 4 February 1923 and then reprinted as a pamphlet by Kegan, Paul, Trench & Trübner (who followed it in the next seven years with more than a hundred other speculative essays, advertised as the “Today and Tomorrow” series).

  In Daedalus, Haldane argued that the technologies that would remake human society in the second half of the twentieth century would mostly be “biological inventions,” the most important of which would be new adventures in food science. He confidently stated that advances in the understanding of basic biological processes would produce many other technological applications of which the world already stood in dire need—but he also sounded a note of caution regarding the manner in which they were likely to be received by the general public. He wrote:

  “Of the biological inventions of the past, four were made before the dawn of history. I refer to the domestication of animals, the domestication of plants, the domestication of fungi for the production of alcohol, and to a fourth invention, which I believe was of more ultimate and far-reaching importance than any of these, since it altered the path of sexual selection… In our own day, two more have been made, namely bactericide and the artificial control of contraception.

  “The first point we may notice about these inventions is that they have all had a profound emotional and ethical effect. Of the four earlier, there is not one which has not formed the basis of a religion…

  “The second point is perhaps harder to express. The chemical or physical inventor is always a Prometheus. There is no great invention, from fire to flying, which has not been hailed as an insult to some god. But if every physical and chemical invention is a blasphemy, every biological invention is a perversion. There is hardly one which, on first being brought to the notice of an observer from any nation which has not previously heard of their existence, would not appear to him as indecent and unnatural.”

  Haldane went on to expand this point, cleverly and wittily, eventually summarizing his conclusions thus:

  “The biological invention then tends to begin as a perversion and end as a ritual supported by unquestioned beliefs and prejudices… With the above facts in your minds I would ask you to excuse what at first sight might appear improbable or indecent in any speculations which appear below.”

  The brief speculative future history included in the essay remains somewhat ahead of its time, although we are now beginning to catch up with it. In Haldane’s speculative future history, food produced by synthetic algae causes a glut in the 1940s. The first ectogenetic child is born in 1951 and—in spite of a condemnatory Papal bull and a fatwa issued by the spiritual leader of Islam—artificial wombs are officially licensed for use in France in 1968, becoming universal in the early twenty-first century.

  Haldane deserves the attention and congratulation of all modern writers of speculative fiction, not so much for his extrapolation of the potentialities of biotechnology—which should have been obvious to any thinking person in 1923 and are entirely beyond dispute today—but for his anticipation of the kind of reactionary response that such innovations as cloning and the genetic engineering of food crops would generate. He was the first person to recognize and call attention to the great irony of biotechnological progress—an irony that has comprehensively blighted all but a few examples of speculative fiction dealing with such innovations.

  One might quarrel with the details of Haldane’s catalogue of great biological inventions, omitting as it does the most fundamental and most crucial of all—cooking and clothing, which between them necessitated the domestication of fire and the development of all the tools whose use perfected the association of hand, eye, and brain—but the gist of his argument is unchallengeable. Everything that we now think of as “human nature”—and, indeed, almost everything we now think of as “nature”—is in fact the product of biotechnological intervention. Everything that we think of as good, every worthwhile human achievement, and every Utopian dream of the past that has ever come to fruition owes its existence to biotechnology. That is the simple truth—and yet, paradoxical as it might seem, one of the corollaries of the grateful awe with which we cling to the produce of the biotechnological discoveries of the past is that we are bound to regard with the deepest suspicion the biotechnological discoveries of our own day, and all those yet to be made.

  Haldane’s chief rival as a scientific essayist in the early
1920s was his close friend Julian Huxley, who extrapolated the ideas contained in Daedalus in a brief satirical parable, “The Tissue-Culture King” (1926). In this story a Western biotechnologist places his skill at the service of a tribal king in central Africa, developing a whole series of production lines. Within the Factory of Kingship—also known as the Wellspring of Ancestral Immortality—the scientist grows tissue cultures of the tribal king and his favored subjects, which are revered by the tribe, whose religious beliefs assign considerable virtue to the principle of symbolic renewal. In the Factory of the Ministers to the Shrines, research into endocrine secretions has enabled the production of giants for the king’s bodyguard and many monstrosities that have also become objects of considerable reverence within the tribal religion.

  Animal monstrosities are mass-produced in the third part of the complex, the Home of the Living Fetishes, three-headed snakes and two-headed toads being the items in greatest demand among the tribesmen.

  The question raised by Huxley’s tale is whether the application of such new biotechnologies in the developed nations would be any less perverted by fetishes and taboos than they would be in the dark heart of Africa—but the author was content to leave it to his younger brother, Aldous, to develop that line of thought further in Brave New World (1932). The most eloquent testimony to the accuracy and force of Haldane’s argument is that for the next fifty years this magnificently cynical and brutally sarcastic comedy was never supplemented, let alone surpassed, by any similarly-comprehensive account of a biotechnologically sophisticated society. There seems to have been a tacit admission by the writers of the next two generations that this cleverly extended and calculatedly sick joke had said all that needed to be said on the subject. Its substance has permeated modern consciousness to such an extent that it is one of those rare books that seems perfectly familiar even to that vast majority of readers who have never bothered to open it.

  Everything that has happened in the field of biotechnology since 1982, however—up to and including the current controversies regarding cloning and genetically modified food—provides conclusive evidence that Haldane was a far better prophet than he could possibly have wished. The vast majority of civilized human beings, who are in every respect the products of biotechnology and who consider the biotechnologies of the past to be entirely and definitively natural, seemingly cannot contemplate the biotechnologies of the present—let alone those of the future—without a suffering the same reflexive tidal-wave of neurotic anxiety and unreasoning antipathy that led Aldous Huxley to write Brave New World. This has always seemed to me to be a ludicrous imbalance direly in need of correction.

  It is for this reason that I have spent a great deal of time during the last twenty years in the production of essays and stories that attempt to construct hypothetical societies in which biotechnologies are boldly and promiscuously deployed to the benefit and betterment of human individuals and human societies. I recently completed a series of six novels mapping out a future history in which the (mostly) wise application of biotechnology eventually leads our post-human descendants to a Utopia of sorts—though not without meeting and overcoming numerous technical and social problems along the way. The novels in question, in the order in which they were designed to be read, are: The Cassandra Complex (2001), Inherit the Earth (1998), Dark Ararat (2002), Architects of Emortality (1999), The Fountains of Youth (2000), and The Omega Expedition (2002).

  The stories in this collection, like those in my earlier collection, Sexual Chemistry: Sardonic Tales of the Genetic Revolution (1991), are exercises in the same spirit, some of them being spin-offs from the series and others investigating alternative biotechnologies not featured in the series. They are mostly comedies, comedy being the best fictional medium for presenting serious ideas, and the only medium suitable for the imagination of future technologies in the arena in which they will make the most profound and progressive difference to our lives: the home. I suppose that it would be wildly optimistic to hope that they might be capable of changing the way that anyone might think about the potential of biotechnology—but what kind of a world would we be living in if it did not have room for a few wild optimists alongside the legions of pessimists who are steadfastly convinced that discovery can have no product but disaster?

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  “What Can Chloe Want?” was first published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, March 1994.

  “The Invisible Worm” was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September 1991.

  “The Age of Innocence” was first published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, June 1995.

  “Snowball in Hell” was first published in Analog, December 2000.

  “The Last Supper” was first published in Science Fiction Age, March 2000.

  “The Facts of Life” was first published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, September 1993.

  “Hot Blood” was first published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, September 2002.

  “The House of Mourning” was first published in Off Limits, edited by Ellen Datlow, St. Martin’s Press, 1996.

  “Another Branch of the Family Tree” was first published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, July 1999.

  “The Milk of Human Kindness” was first published in Analog, March 2001.

  “The Pipes of Pan” was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, June 1997.

  WHAT CAN CHLOE WANT?

  While her parents argued in their usual niggling fashion, Chloe watched the piglets sucking at the sow’s teats. She didn’t quite understand what the argument was about. She rarely did. Mostly she tried to shut out the sound, by concentrating hard on something else. For the moment, there was only the sow and its piglets, and so she concentrated on those. The pigs and piglets she had seen in her picture-books were pink, but these weren’t; their skin was much the same color as Daddy’s: a very pale brown.

  The sow was huge. If it had been able to stand on its hind legs it would have been two feet taller than Daddy, who was not a small man, but it couldn’t stand on its hind legs. In fact, it couldn’t stand at all. It was too fat. It had to be fed through a tube.

  What must it be like, Chloe wondered, to have to lie down all the time, having food pumped into you? It must be like being a baby all over again. Although it was feeding its own babies now, the sow’s life had come full circle; it had started out as a tiny helpless bundle of flesh, and had ended up as a giant helpless bundle of flesh.

  Someday, Chloe knew, the sow would just be meat: bacon, ham, and sausages. Even the eyes and the bones could be ground up to make sausages, or so one of the boys at school had told her. He might have been lying. Anyhow, some of that huge mass of flesh would become human flesh by being eaten. Some of it might even become her own flesh. It was an intriguing, if slightly unpleasant, thought.

  The argument faded away, for the moment. Mummy was tight-lipped and silent. Daddy had turned away to talk to the red-faced man who had brought them into the shed. “Can you bring it out?” he asked. “I’d like her to touch it—to hold it—if that’s okay.”

  “Sure,” said the red-faced man. “Why not?” He climbed over the bars and went to pick up one of the piglets. It squealed when he took it away from the teat. He brought it back, and knelt down so that Chloe could reach out to it.

  Chloe wasn’t sure that she wanted to touch the piglet, but Daddy obviously wanted her to. She ran a tentative finger along its side and twitched its ear. It was warm, and its skin was soft and smooth. The sensation was nicer than she had anticipated.

  “She doesn’t want to, Mike,” her mother said. “You can see that.”

  “She’s just nervous,” Daddy said, taking the piglet from the man and cradling it in his big hands. “Go on darling, it’s okay. Stroke her.”

  Chloe stroked the piglet. She was a good girl. She always did what she was told.

  “This isn’t necessary,” Mummy said.
“It really isn’t.”

  “She ought to have the opportunity to understand,” her father replied, stubbornly.

  “Understand! She’s seven years old, Mike. How can she even begin to understand?”

  “She won’t always be seven. Do you want to hold her, Lovely? Go on—take her.”

  Chloe’s hands weren’t big enough to cradle the piglet the way her father had. She had to clutch the tiny creature in her arms, as though it were one of her dolls—except that it resisted her, and she had to clutch it tightly to stop it wriggling out of her grasp. She tried to hug it, the way Mummy hugged her, but the piglet didn’t want to be hugged. The piglet wanted to get back to its mother’s teat.

  “Be careful of her coat, Mike,” Mummy complained. “She’ll get dirty. Please take it away—they’re neither of them enjoying it.”

  Chloe was wearing her sky-blue raincoat with the belt. She’d got it dirty before, and Mummy hadn’t seemed to mind overmuch. Even so, when the red-faced man reached out to take the piglet back, Chloe wasn’t sorry to be rid of it.

  “That’s the piglet that’s going to save your life,” her father said, as she released it. “The one you just held in your hands.”

  “Mike!” wailed Mummy, in her most exasperated voice. “Do you have to?”

  “Yes,” said Daddy, firmly. “It’s important. She ought to understand what’s happening, as best she can.” But he didn’t try to explain it to her—not then.

  * * * *

  The next time Chloe’s father brought her to visit the piglet, Mummy stayed at home. That was better, because it meant that Daddy wasn’t always talking over her head; except for what he said to the men in white coats, everything he said was meant for her. She preferred that.

  The piglet was no longer in the pen with the sow. It had its own pen now, not in the shed any more but in the big house, in a place where there were all kinds of machines and everything was clean. The piglet was running back and forth now, and taking notice of things, and it didn’t squeal at all. When Chloe and her father knelt down outside the pen it came towards them, looking at them from its pretty dark eyes. Chloe wondered if it recognized her.