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INTRODUCTION

The stories in this collection were initially reprinted in a collection published by Simon & Schuster (UK), Sexual Chemistry: Sardonic Tales of the Genetic Revolution, in 1991. It was the first such collection I assembled, and this near-reprint will now be the last, thus rounding the whole endeavor off. It completes the set of Borgo Press collections of my short fiction in that vein, all of which while hopefully become available as e-books in the relatively near future, thus being adapted to the brief new world of phantom publication.

There are seven such collections in all, the other six being Designer Genes (Five Star, 2004; Borgo Press, 2013), The Cure for Love (Borgo Press, 2007), The Tree of Life (Borgo Press, 2007), In the Flesh (Borgo Press, 2009) The Great Chain of Being (Borgo Press, 2010) and The Golden Fleece (Borgo Press, 2012). There have also been eleven novels of the same ilk: Inherit the Earth (Tor, 1998), Architects of Emortality (Tor, 1999), The Fountains of Youth (Tor, 2000), The Cassandra Complex (Tor, 2001), Dark Ararat (Tor, 2002), The Omega Expedition (Tor, 2002), The Dragon Man (Borgo Press, 2009), The Undead (Borgo Press, 2010; in a double volume with the novella Les Fleurs du Mal), Xeno’s Paradox (Borgo Press, 2011), Zombies Don’t Cry (Borgo Press, 2011) and Nature’s Shift (Borgo Press, 2011). Many, but by no means all, of the stories in the series share a common future-historical background, an early version of which was first sketched out in a futurology book, The Third Millennium: A History of the World 2000-3000, written in collaboration with David Langford in 1983 and published by Knopf and Sidgwick & Jackson in 1985.

Although seven and eleven are not round numbers, they do have a certain charm, not so much because of their combination in the generic name of a kind of convenience store but because they are the key scores determining wins and losses in the game of craps; there are also seven deadly sins and eleven members of a cricket team, which referents comprise as good a synoptic account of my life and loves as any other. I am therefore content to find a certain quasi-Pythagorean propriety in the fact that the complete series has turned out to consist of seven collections and eleven novels.

I used the term “near-reprint” above because the Simon & Schuster collection also contained a futurological essay, “Mankind in the Third Millennium,” which resulted from my one and only accidental brush with apparent intellectual status, when I was invited to address of conference for “young scientists and engineers” at the Japan Science Foundation in Tokyo in 1987, where The Third Millennium, had recently been published in Japanese translation. The other two keynote speakers at the conference both went on to win Nobel prizes, whereas my own career, which subsequently turned out to have peaked in 1987, has followed a downward trajectory ever since. That is, as they say, the way the cookie crumbles. As the only thing that dates faster than antique science fiction is antique futurology, there seemed to be little point in preserving the essay’s anomalous presence here, although I might one day yield to the temptation to put together a collection of my exercises in antique futurology, in order to make an eccentric contribution to the perverse esthetics of error.

Time has, inevitably, not been very kind to the stories included here, all of which seem even more unlikely now than they did in the late 1980s when all but one of them were written. The exception, which is included because it is the first story I ever wrote about genetic engineering, dates from 1968, although it took seven years to sell—an omen if ever there was one. Even in the late 1980s, and in spite of being in my heyday, it was hard to maintain the defiant optimism that I deliberately adopted at that time as a standpoint in offering my peculiar propaganda for biotechnology, and it now seems frankly absurd, but fiction is not futurology, and has other esthetic resources than merely displaying a tragic comedy of errors. Every world within a fictitious text is a universe in its own right, with its own parameters of possibility, and the fact that any plausible connection between a future-set story and the world in which it was written inevitably ebbs away is largely irrelevant to the potential enjoyment of the text.

In the introduction to the earlier version of this book I suggested that the stories should not be seen as a series of literary portraits of the future but rather as a series of caricatures, and called attention to the obvious but slightly ironic fact that caricatures carrying meaning much more readily than portraits. I also commented on the sarcastic tone of the stories, identifying their black comedy as an intrinsic aspect of the essential seriousness of their purpose. Alas, thirty years of a downward career tragedy have not lessened to the slightest degree my twisted sense of vocation, my stubborn liking for paradox or my ridiculous tendency to pretentiousness, so all of that still seems perfectly reasonable to me, and I stand by every word. I still believe that biotechnology offers the only hope humankind has of emerging from the current ecocatastrophe with any shred of dignity intact, and although my optimism has shriveled and died, I still wish, deep down, that the hope might somehow be fulfilled.

Looking back on this collection, I still feel reasonably content with the quality of the work herein, and very proud of three of the items, which remain among my all-time favorites—although the judgment is perhaps not worth much, given my inevitable prejudice. Several of the stories were subsequently integrated into longer works, “The Magic Bullet” providing the seed of The Cassandra Complex, an expanded version of “And He Not Busy Being Born” supplying the frame-narrative for The Omega Expedition and “The Growth of the House of Usher” forming the launching-pad for Nature’s Shift, but each of the original versions retains a particular identity of its own.

“Sexual Chemistry” was originally published in Interzone 20 in 1987. “Bedside Conversations” first appeared in the December 1990 issue of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. “Cinderella’s Sisters” first appeared in the first issue of The Gate in 1989. “The Magic Bullet” first appeared in Interzone 29 in 1989. “The Invertebrate Man” first appeared in Interzone 39 in 1990. “The Furniture of Life’s Ambition” first appeared in Zenith 2 in 1990. “The Fury That Hell Withheld” first appeared in Interzone 35 in 1990. And earlier version of “The Engineer and the Executioner” appeared in the May 1975 issue of Amazing Science Fiction. “The Growth of the House of Usher” first appeared in Interzone 24 in 1988. “And He Not Busy Being Born” first appeared in Interzone 16 in 1986.