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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?