Genetic Engineering and Science Fiction Warning Stories

Let’s Talk about Science Fiction, Babies

There’s an interesting discussion over at Pharyngula about the possibilities and dangers inherent in human genetic engineering.

The thread is slightly annoying — a fair bit of priveleged wanking, and no one really bringing sophisticated social theory to the table. But on balance, I’d say it’s mostly interesting, at least in terms of seeing how people want to forecast the future.

As I read the comment thread, the thing that strikes me most as a science fiction writer is how much the discourse of science fiction shapes the discourse about these future technologies. On an obvious level, there are appeals to Heinlein, Egan, and similar hard SF ilk. On a subtler level, the themes that people are presenting as thought-provoking in the discussion (what if we modified people to be obedient? what if there was speciation between upper class and lower class people? what if people want to modify their children in ways we find abhorrent?) are in fact staples of the science fiction genre.

In my opinion, near future hard SF (that’s science fiction that works with the best science contemporarily available to forcast events in the next, say, fifty years) has a problem. And that problem is plot. Consider Frankenstein, a very early work of science fiction — a scientist is able to create life, but the novel’s shape is that of a warning story. We Must Not Because.

Writers working within the constraints of traditional plotting have to find a conflict. Science fiction is often a medium of ideas, which means that the conflict generally has to be related to the idea. So, if you want to write about genetic engineering, you have to do so in a way that gives obeisance to conflict.

I am convinced this creates warning stories even where science fiction writers don’t want to write warning stories. It’s a natural form. If you want to write about Neat Idea X, and your story-writing formula is “create problem within the first two paragraphs,” then the urge is to warn against whatever Neat Idea X is. You still get to write about it.

A further problem is that ideas tend to be explored in a finite number of ways. On one hand, this is because the culture that gives rise to the science fiction has a certain number of associations with a given science fictional idea. The western writers who are forecasting dark, genetically engineered futures — and doing so with generally the same set of tools and projected outcomes — are writing within a western context that has certain central concerns about genetic engineering, and certain hegemonic assumptions about reproduction, etc. We would expect that the science fictional discourse would shift when you look at a different culture with different concerns and assumptions, and from what I know about the growing science fiction movements in India and China, this does indeed prove to be the case.

However, the interaction is recursive. Science fiction writers pen their works within the cultural context that shapes their concerns, assumptions, and the channels of their forecasting. At the same time, they shape the discourse. As John Scalzi pointed out last year when he generously agreed to speak to the science fiction class I was teaching, the shape of the cell phone bears an uncanny similarity to the shape of the Star Trek communicator. This particular convergence seems to be only one of many examples of scientists looking at science fictional technology and thinking, “Ooh, I want that!” Science fictionally proposed theories about space and space travel trickle down into the naming of things, and sometimes their study, in an observable fashion.

It’s trickier to observe other influences of science fiction writers on the discourse about science and the future, but they’re present. I’ve argued before that the ways in which people perceive the world are heavily influenced by narrative and story, and so the narratives that are introduced into the culture about certain ideas are shaped by that culture, but once they are present, they shape it as well. Ant-like matriarchal societies, huge TV screens showing Big Brother talking to you, sad grey-clad people in communist dystopias wearing jumpsuits and going through identical motions — these images have shaped some of our impressions of matriarchy, fascism, and communism. Many discussions of matriarchy, for instance, end up reaching back to the imagery that’s entered our cultural consciousness — and terms that evoke insects or hive-minds are deployed. The same thing happens with genetic engineering and the limited number of narratives and images we associate with it. The first few shiny, imagination-catching ideas tend to overwhelm our cultural ability to imagine other outcomes.

The Problems with Warning Stories

Warning stories can be great: fun to read, fun to write. Some of them are also interesting and sophisticated.

However, I worry about the endless parade of science fictional monsters tramping through our cultural imagination. Cloning does not work the way 90% of science fictional representations say it does. Really. Nothing like. I’ve been involved in many bizarre conversations with cloning opponents, and at a certain point, their arguments tend to hark back to weird cultural myths built out of Star Trek and Twilight Zone rip-offs.

There are three problems here.

1) Bad science: many science fiction writers wrote clones that worked in ways that have more to do with fantasy zombies than what actual clones could possibly be because those fantasy zombie clones were more useful for plot and conflict. Because most laypeople know very little about genetics or cloning, the bad science passes them by.

2) One-dimensional (or as good as) representation, which does not allow for ambiguity in the expression of the science fictional idea or the imagined cultural reaction to it.

3) The playing into monster story tropes which follow a certain formula, and therefore require the writer and audience to envision the science fictional idea as part of a monster mold.

Eventually, the combination of bad science, unambiguous representation, and the monster trope seeps down into our narrative about a science fictional idea, and that’s the point at which someone will seriously oppose cloning because they’re afraid that clones will share the memories, experiences, and developmental history of existing adults, and therefore be able to take over the world.

Breaking Out of the Warning Mold

Writers have several ways to navigate these problems while still paying proper attention to conflict. One is to make the conflict much smaller than the level of “Oh noes! Monsters!” which allows the science fiction trope to play out more subtly and resist becoming the basis for a monster-level plot. A fantastic example of this kind of writing as applied to the genetic engineering/cloning tropes, is Tananarive Due’s “Like Daughter,” a story in which a woman of color who was physically abused as a child decides to raise a clone of herself so that she can give “herself” a new, happy childhood. Unfortunately, the child suffers from being treated as a kind of doll and required to enact her mother’s fantasy upbringing. The mother’s best friend has to interfere and take the girl away.

I wish this story was online as it is truly remarkable. It can be found in the excellent anthology Dark Matter (a century of speculative fiction from the African Diaspora), edited by Sheree Thomas.

The conflict of “Like Daughter” echoes in several different directions. The conflict is personal in a way that survives outside the science fiction context, reflecting on the nature of mothers, daughters, and childhood trauma. The conflict is also sociological: as a professor of mine at UC Santa Cruz said about the story, the question of how to resolve traumatic history is particularly salient for the community of color, and it is no accident that the author is black. Thirdly, the conflict does revolve around the science fictional idea of cloning: without cloning, it would be impossible for the story’s conceit to exist. However, the clone does not need to be made into a monster (or, in the flip, made into a one-dimensionally virtuous yet beleaguered outsider) in order for the conflict to function, because the nature of the story’s conflict is subtle.

In science fiction communities, there’s a concept which has caused much war-drumming on one side, and much wailing and gnashing of teeth on the other. It’s a fledgling literary movement called mundane science fiction, or mundane SF. The mundane SF movement was started by science fiction writer Geoff Ryman. It asks writers to eschew some of science fiction’s splashier tropes in order to create more realistic, more resonant futures. In order to accomplish this, the mundane movement has banned certain topics, included AI, faster-than-light space travel, psychic energy, and aliens. I think cloning’s on the list.

I think that the banning of topics may accomplish slivers of the mundane SF movement’s goals, but that the movement would have been better off asking for limited scope instead of limited ideas. For me, the science fiction that feels most real and moving is not necessarily science fiction which does not contain aliens — Octavia Butler’s “Amnesty,” for instance, makes beautiful use of aliens — but that science fiction which limits its scope to investigating personal relationships within an altered future instead of grander, global-level catastrophes. That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy other flavors of SF, but this is the type that generally moves me the most. (There are exceptions, such as Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, which definitely functions on a grand and global level.)

The other most dominant technique that I see writers using so that they can avoid monster story formulas while still exploring neat ideas and paying due deference to plot, is to make the science fictional trope part of the story’s background. For instance, in John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, characters who become soldiers are genetically modified so that they are faster, stronger, greener, and melded with their own AIs. Scalzi’s plot revolves around a war which these characters are fighting. The genetic modifications are integral to the plot — they make the war possible — but they don’t need to be the impetus for conflict, because a different science fictional trope has taken that center stage.

Scalzi’s book works on a grand scale, but it’s also possible to background science fictional tropes while working on a more limited scale. One novel that comes to mind is Maureen McHugh’s China Mountain Zhang, in which many fascinating science fictional elements — future homophobia, America’s loss of primacy as a global power, the colonization of Mars, people who can use technology to have flying races — function as the background in service to the main characters’ more mundane problems. How can people learn to be happy with each other? How can a gay man, isolated and displaced, find his place in the world? The backdrops are Mars and a decaying future, but the problems are timeless.

Unfortunately, the technique of slipping science fictional ideas into the background so that the conflict can be derived from something else tends to work better for novels than short stories. Short stories are limited in how much they can tackle, so it’s difficult for them to investigate more than one idea at a time.

Science Fiction Writer’s Responsibility in Shaping the Discourse

It concerns me that when I look at a thread like the one on Pharyngula, I see a lot of analysis that’s shaped by science fiction narratives, when I know that some of those narratives are driven more by the need for an exciting plot than by any real scientific or sociological extrapolation.

People differ in the amount of responsibility that they feel art has to the real world. I’m on the high end: I’m all about social responsibility.

I think science fiction writers owe it to ourselves and to the culture not to use genre formulas without a clear understanding of what they are, what they do, and why we want to use them. That doesn’t mean genre formulas have to go away, but I’d like to see them used with awareness and deliberation. When they’re used with awareness and deliberation, they usually (in my experience) tend to shift anyway: new narrative possibilities open, and the characters, story, and discourse have a chance to breathe.