Designer Genes. Brian Stableford
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