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
