Human drafts
While I was writing an early draft of The Bond, I often looked for inspiration in the daily news. I was writing something set in the future, yet I wanted it to be grounded in the way we live now.
Many writers experimenting with the future do this. Among them is Margaret Atwood, who famously used only real elements in The Handmaid's Tale, her dystopia about the fictional country of Gilead. Here, Atwood explains:
I made a rule for myself: I would not include anything that human beings had not already done in some other place or time, or for which the technology did not already exist. I did not wish to be accused of dark, twisted inventions, or of misrepresenting the human potential for deplorable behavior. The group-activated hangings, the tearing apart of human beings, the clothing specific to castes and classes, the forced childbearing and the appropriation of the results, the children stolen by regimes and placed for upbringing with high-ranking officials, the forbidding of literacy, the denial of property rights—all had precedents, and many of these were to be found, not in other cultures and religions, but within Western society, and within the “Christian” tradition itself. (I enclose “Christian” in quotation marks since I believe that much of the Church’s behavior and doctrine during its two-millennia-long existence as a social and political organization would have been abhorrent to the person after whom it is named.)
In my case, many of my "fantastical" elements are grounded in actual science. One of them is the gene-editing of human fetuses that exploded into the news over Thanksgiving. According to the New York Times, He Jiankui announced at a Hong Kong conference that he had "used the gene-editing technique Crispr to alter embryos," which he then implanted in the womb of a woman who gave birth to twin girls this month.
In one news piece, the word "draft" referred to the multiple human embryos created during IVF treatments. We could also apply that word to Dr. He's embryos. Writers also call early versions of their work "drafts." It means an attempt to create a thing that the creator knows still needs to be perfected. That really stuck with me. If we are fiddling around with the human genome, inevitably we will make drafts prior to a final, perfected human. Inevitably.
Will the beings borns from these mistakes have a right to live -- even have rights at all?
In The Bond, humans are assembled in labs and engineered for best outcomes -- at least, in the eyes of that society. That's a pretty familiar set-up (and I do complicate this in many ways). But what I was struck by while researching CRISPR news is how much we're already engineered. To be sure, only Dr. He has admitted implanting a genetically-engineered embryo in a woman. But I suspect others may have done this or dream of doing it. There is an inevitability to working with human genetics we simply can't ignore.
We have to admit: aren't we already "engineered" in important ways by vaccines, among other things? Advances of modern medicine have dramatically extended human life expectancy? We've engineered our worlds in countless ways, ways that favor many (or some) and disfavor others. These poinsettias, for example, have been engineered in a hundred ways, for color, shipping resilience, bloom time, and pest resistance, for example (I took this photo during a class visit to a commercial greenhouse).
Most people eat highly engineered food (that tomato you prize in the farmers' market may be local and organic, but it's the product of generations of engineering, just as the corn, basil, and grass-fed beef are), live in highly engineered space, travel in highly engineered vehicles, work in highly engineered offices. So isn't it inevitable that we peer under the hood, as it were, of the human body?
The real question is how we come to some sort of agreement on how to address this use of technology. And examining how this technology works through a story is one way to do that.
On book news, The Bond releases December 3 (tomorrow!). If you know of someone who might be interested in subscribing to my newsletter, please feel free to forward!