Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) has influenced public debates over genetics more profoundly than any other work of literature with the possible exception of Frankenstein. Both works have been misremembered, misunderstood, and misused in polemical contexts more often than not. In Huxley’s case, the problem arises from readers’ failing to admit that his satire cuts in more than one direction. The novelist was witness to the birth of the modern synthesis in biology, and he was a strong advocate of the biological sciences. But he was a moral relativist and a satirist too, and he was always ready to satirize the people he loved and the ideas he embraced. He had the curse of being able to see through everything. To grasp the real meaning of Brave New World for society today, we need to understand Huxley’s relationship to both the modern synthesis and the art of satire.

To scientists, the “modern synthesis” names the shift in biology that occurred in the years between the two world wars when scientists brought together Darwin’s theory of evolution with the new science of genetics. One of the pioneers of the modern synthesis was J. B. S. Haldane, a longtime friend of Aldous Huxley; another proponent was the novelist’s older brother, Julian Huxley. Haldane (along with R. A. Fisher and Sewall Wright) demonstrated with compelling mathematical analyses that Darwin was correct to assert that natural selection was the primary cause of evolution. Adding genetics to the theory of evolution supplied one of the key elements missing from Darwin’s concept, namely an understanding of how the inheritance of traits actually took place. The result was a powerful consensus, which prevails even today, that the evidence of genetics largely confirms Darwin’s original insights.

In the first two decades of the twentieth century, Darwinism was in decline (Bowler, Eclipse of Darwinism).¹ Long under assault by religious opponents, Darwin’s theory of natural selection came under renewed criticism by scientists too in the 1880s, and this trend only intensified with the rediscovery of Mendel’s work in 1900. Early Mendelians doubted that natural selection alone could account for the clear-cut differences among Mendelian factors that their model described. Additionally, some Mendelians such as William Bateson were saltationists who believed that large mutations, not the small continuous variations Darwin postulated, better explained species change. Evolution was seen as an account of inheritance – of how characteristics were transmitted across time. Genetics, by contrast, was a science of difference: it explained how individuals varied from one another. So pervasive was the impression that Darwin’s ideas had been superseded that Haldane twice used the ironic epigraph “Darwinism is dead” for publications that showed Darwin’s continuing relevance to modern biology.²

Brave New World represents a modern synthesis of a different sort. Dystopian fiction arises from the fusion of two radically opposed literary genres, naturalism and utopia. In an excellent treatment of contemporary dystopian films, Phillip Wegner proposes that in the early twentieth century, dystopia emerges when naturalism’s “thoroughgoing pessimism about the present moment is suddenly transported into the otherworldly space of the utopian fiction” (118). Wegner, like Fredric Jameson before him, notes the historical conjuncture of late-nineteenth-century utopias such as Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) and William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890) with the naturalism of George Gissing and others.³ Both Bellamy and Morris explicitly acknowledged that their novels were counterblasts to the pessimism of writers such as Gissing. Dystopia, which dates as a genre from the first decade of the next century, counters utopia’s rebuke to naturalism with its own dark reply. Dystopia constructs a model society by extrapolating from the worst, not the best, features of the contemporary world. Its status as a generic synthesis is endorsed by a later giant of the tradition, George Orwell, who told the British publisher of Nineteen Eighty-Four that his book was a futuristic “fantasy, but in the form of a naturalistic novel” (quoted in Wegner, 122; Orwell’s italics).

Aldous Huxley’s close association with some of the principal biologists of the day prompts one to ask whether juxtaposing the modern synthesis in genetics with the literary synthesis that resulted in dystopia can reveal something new about each phenomenon. The prominence of evolutionary ideas in naturalism, Victorian utopias, and modern dystopias suggests it might. The role of determinism in both the genetics of the period and the plot structure of dystopian fiction offers another clue. Finally, the dense circuit of literary exchanges in the years 1927–1932 among novelists and scientists who knew one another well – Haldane, Julian Huxley, and Aldous Huxley in particular, but also Haldane’s wife, Charlotte Haldane, who anticipated Brave New World with her own novel about the future of genetics, Man’s World (1926), and Bertrand Russell, whose The Scientific Outlook (1931) contains numerous anticipations of Brave New World – clinches the case for examining dystopia and early-twentieth-century genetics in tandem, as two modes of “modern synthesis.”⁴

J. B. S. Haldane was a legend among twentieth-century biologists. He was the son of J. S. Haldane, a distinguished physiologist who invented the gas mask worn by British soldiers in World War I and who was famous for conducting experiments on himself in a sealed breathing chamber on his estate. The younger Haldane was such a precocious assistant in his father’s research that he published his own scientific paper at the age of twelve. In adult life, he too became famous for experimenting on himself in a decompression chamber, but his most important contributions to science were his mathematical studies of natural selection that established him as one of the founders of population genetics. A committed socialist throughout life, Haldane withdrew from the communist party following the discrediting of the Russian geneticist Lysenko, but he never renounced his support for a world government and rational state.

Julian Huxley was a close friend and early collaborator with Haldane. Descended from Thomas H. Huxley on his father’s side and Matthew Arnold on his mother’s (as was, of course, his younger brother, Aldous), Julian Huxley spent his early career divided between evolutionary biology and avian ethology, a field that he helped create. During his years as chair of the newly founded biology department at Rice University, he hired Hermann J. Muller, who would soon do the pioneering experiments that demonstrated the effects of X-rays on the genetics of fruit flies, a breakthrough referenced in Brave New World. Later in his career, Julian Huxley largely gave up research to write popular science and to engage in political advocacy for environmental causes and the advancement of science. Like Haldane, he was a socialist and internationalist, and he became the first director-general of UNESCO and one of the founders of the World Wildlife Fund.

Haldane, Julian Huxley, and Aldous Huxley were all prolific essayists for newspapers and monthly magazines both in England and America. Haldane was a superb stylist, who wove personal anecdotes and strong opinions together with vivid imagery and wit. During the years when he was publishing the mathematical articles that were collected as an appendix to his landmark study The Causes of Evolution (1932), he also published two of his finest volumes of personal essays, Possible Worlds (1927) and The Inequality of Man (1932) (issued the next year in America as Science and Human Life). Aldous Huxley’s debt to Haldane’s youthful essay “Daedalus, or, Science and the Future” (1923) has long been acknowledged by scholars of Brave New World. What is not well known is that many of the essays in Possible Worlds and Science and Human Life respond to or provoke a response from Aldous Huxley’s copious essays of the same years, especially those collected in Proper Studies (1927) and Do What You Will (1929). The two old acquaintances appear to be feeding off one another at a distance, writing on the same topics, picking up ideas for articles, borrowing from one another, responding, and arguing, all mediated by Julian Huxley, whose conversations with his brother about genetics D. H. Lawrence overheard with outraged dissent when the three – Aldous, Julian, and Lawrence – were neighbors in Switzerland in the winter of 1928.⁵

The richness of this multisided exchange has only been remarked in passing by Huxley’s biographers. Its significance, in my view, far exceeds the question of where Huxley derived his ideas for Brave New World.⁶ It gives us a close-up view of a supremely intelligent novelist who knew more about the biological sciences than any fiction writer of his day. Huxley was fascinated by the biological sciences throughout his life.⁷ His early novels are full of satiric but loving portraits of biologists and physiologists; their ideas, work habits, lab assistants, hobbyhorses, and domestic arrangements are described in comic detail (twice we meet biologists too immersed in their work to notice their wives’ affairs). But the prevailing tone is that of affection. Huxley knew scientists well and admired their ways, not only from being around his brother and Haldane, but from Haldane’s father, who was paterfamilias at Cherwell, the Haldane estate near Oxford where Huxley spent many a night while at university, and the model for the bumbling scientist Lord Tantamount in Point Counter Point. One summer while at Cherwell, Huxley, Haldane, and his younger sister Naomi acted a play that she wrote about genetics – eighteen full years before Brave New World.⁸ In contrast to the impression of most casual readers that the author of Brave New World was a confirmed opponent of science, he proclaimed in a lovely essay from 1925, “A Night at Pietramala,” that he would rather be a scientist like Michael Faraday than even Shakespeare.

The important question about this relationship is not who influenced whom – what matters is Huxley’s immersion in a shared discourse about biology.⁹ It often happened that Huxley published his opinion on, say, IQ tests, and Haldane took up the subject shortly thereafter, providing information about research that Huxley does not consider.¹⁰ In other instances, the two seem to draw on shared life experiences. Both tell stories of how their particular talent was allowed to flourish only because they were lucky enough to escape the Procrustean measures of England’s educational system; both write portraits of the frenetic sweating experiments Haldane’s father conducted at Cherwell.¹¹ Finally, there are the many occasions when Huxley catches a notion from Haldane and incorporates it in his essays or fiction. Haldane’s “Daedalus,” of course, is a treasure trove of ideas about pre-implantation genetic screening, artificial insemination, and ectogenesis (growing babies in a bottle), which inspired Huxley’s account of the Central London Hatchery in Brave New World. Less well known are the many facets of Huxley’s writing drawn from elsewhere in Haldane’s works. The slow maturation of human children; the distinction between advanced science, which theorizes, and rudimentary science, which merely observes particulars; the potential for developing antiaging technologies; the use of hormones to delay menopause; the importance of nitrogen in agriculture; the need to be the right size for your evolutionary niche; the value of preventative medicine; antivivisectionists as enemies of science – these themes and more are common to both writers.

Attending to this shared discourse opens up important questions about what it meant to be modern in different intellectual spheres and the various functions of synthesis in the scientific and literary domains.¹² This chapter examines the unifying or synthetic mode of thinking that is common to both scientific modernity and Huxley’s satire and then demonstrates that Aldous Huxley’s satiric mode more closely reflects the views held by his scientific friends than the literary modernists of his day. It ends by turning to Brave New World to argue that Huxley’s dystopian synthesis has largely been misinterpreted in popular culture as a warning against science when instead its satire unsettles certainties in much the same way that Haldane believed science should. As different as they appear, the modern synthesis in biology and the dystopian synthesis in literature helped define a moment in the early twentieth century when scientific rationality and literary satire felt like a shared response to the modern world.

Synthesis, Science, and Modernity

The neo-Darwinian synthesis, at least insofar as one focuses on Haldane and Julian Huxley, was “modern” in a distinctive way.¹³ In the early twentieth century, the unification of the sciences was a widely shared goal. Julian Huxley describes the ideal at the beginning of Evolution: The Modern Synthesis:

Haldane, who attended the Second International Congress for the Unity of Sciences, similarly takes physics as his model, citing the achievements of J. J. Thomson and Ernest Rutherford as evidence that “science is committed to the attempt to unify human experience” (Causes 84).

Synthesis did not mean the same thing to modern biologists that interdisciplinarity means to us today. Even though Haldane, Fisher, and Wright were remarkably interdisciplinary thinkers, what they meant by synthesis had to do with the end product of research, not its method. Nor did synthesis require dialectical thinking. The reconciliation of evolution and genetics would not emerge from the clash of thesis and antithesis. Rather, the effort was to discern the underlying unity between the two theories. The goal was to find a common ground, and the ambition was imbued with a sense of idealism and progress.

The impact of the modern synthesis in genetics and the dystopian synthesis in literature are related in important ways. First, they are both examples of the power of an idea to inaugurate a field for further work, to constitute what Foucault termed a discursive formation. The unification of Darwin’s concept of natural selection with Mendelian genetics opened up experimental programs not only for geneticists but eventually for naturalists, morphologists, and paleontologists.¹⁴ The dystopian synthesis was enormously fruitful as well. Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1921), Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953), Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962), Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and MaddAdam trilogy (2003–2013), Philip Kerr’s A Philosophical Investigation (1992), Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), Gary Shteyngart’s A Super Sad True Love Story (2010), Chang-Rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea (2014), Gish Jen’s The Resisters (2020) – these are just some of the highpoints of a genre that did not exist prior to the twentieth century.

Similarly, both syntheses exhibited a crucial aspect of modernity – a resolutely demystified vision of reality, what Weber just a few years earlier had called the “disenchantment of the world” (Weber 155). Haldane and Julian Huxley had no patience with metaphysical, religious, or pseudoscientific theories that attempted to mitigate the materialist foundation of the evolutionary synthesis. Haldane’s demonstration that the natural selection of purely random mutations was the basis of all evolution, human and otherwise, made no compromise with mystical or idealist notions that postulated a guiding purpose to evolution. He inveighed against the folly of Henri Bergson’s concept of “élan vital, or vital force, which pushed organisms forward along the path of evolution” (Causes 89). Russell, too, rejected fuzzy-minded ideas in the 1920s such as Arthur Eddington’s postulation of a “mind-stuff” directing evolution or Lloyd Morgan’s “emergent evolution” that suggested a “Divine Purpose underlying the course of evolution.”¹⁵

A third unifying features of this circle was opposition to the still-vocal proponents of neo-Lamarckism, which I discussed in Chapter 3. The Huxley–Haldane circle was adamant in resisting any attempt to sugarcoat the materialist foundation of the modern synthesis. Haldane could not be more blunt: He declares the mind to be a “by-product or epiphenomenon of certain material systems” (Causes 87); the process of evolution “does not suggest the work of an intelligent designer, still less of an almighty one” (Causes 85); and natural selection leads to no goal. These attitudes mark a decisive break with the goal-oriented, willed evolution common in neo-Lamarckian fiction of the prior century.

Aldous Huxley writes against neo-Lamarckism as frequently as Haldane or Julian Huxley. In his second novel, Antic Hay (1923), Huxley mocks an earnest young biologist who tells his mentor that he has “found a way of making acquired characteristics … heritable” (94). Everything in the scene, from the description of the young man’s “dark protruding eyes, and staring, doggy nostrils” (94) to the preposterousness of the experiment that involved injecting pulped eyes of a dead rabbit into a pregnant rabbit, underlines how bogus Huxley finds such pseudoscience. In Brave New World, the necessity to genetically reengineer every generation and to reinforce behavioral modifications through lifelong psychological conditioning dramatizes that none of the artificially acquired traits were heritable.

To underline the cultural ramifications of the modern synthesis, Haldane, Julian Huxley, Bertrand Russell, and Aldous Huxley all explicitly attack the writings of Samuel Butler and George Bernard Shaw. Butler’s Life and Habit (1878) and Unconscious Memory (1880) remained touchstones for the neo-Lamarckian cause well into the twentieth century. Shaw’s Preface to Back to Methuselah (1921) became even more widely known during the 1920s for its championing of neo-Lamarckism. Shaw maintained that humans were capable of developing new traits by willing them into existence. Evolution by “senseless accident” (Shaw xvi) seemed impossible to the playwright. Instead, he maintained (with no evidence whatsoever) that “the will to do anything can and does, at a certain pitch of intensity set up by conviction of its necessity, create and organize new tissue to do it” (xvi). The power of what he called “creative evolution” would be capable of extending the human life span to 3,000 years once we marshaled sufficient will to stimulate this organic change (xvi). Echoing a long line of neo-Lamarckian polemicists, Shaw asserted: “If you like eating the tender tops of trees enough to make you concentrate all your energies on the stretching of your neck, you will finally get a long neck, like the giraffe” (xxi). But he was frank in admitting that he did not have a clue as to why. “Nobody knows how: nobody knows why: all we know is that the thing actually takes place” (xxiii). Hence, the disdainful tone of Haldane’s reply is hardly surprising: “[Shaw] admits that Darwinism cannot be disproved, but goes on to state that no decent-minded person can believe in it. This is the attitude of mind of the persecutor rather than the discoverer” (Causes 88).

The more interesting question was why serious scientists such as Haldane, Julian Huxley, and Russell felt that scientific amateurs such as Shaw and Butler needed rebutting. The answer lay in the cultural impact literary advocates of neo-Lamarckism continued to have long after its scientific credibility had been eroded. Had science policy committees existed in the 1930s, the importance of countering such distortions of genetics in literature and popular culture would have been evident.

Haldane’s comments often have the fervor of a biologist today warring against theorists of Intelligent Design. Like Wells in The Time Machine, Haldane situates the nonteleological character of evolution in the context of the species’ eventual extinction: “Most lines of descent end in extinction, … [which] does not suggest the work of an intelligent designer, still less of an almighty one” (Causes 85). Further, Haldane sees the deplorable condition of the human species as a sign that the idea of directed evolution – whether by a creator or by the willed exertion of our faculties – is a sham. “If evolution, guided by mind for a thousand million years, had only got as far as man, the outlook for the future would not be very bright” (Causes 88).

In place of the neo-Lamarckian dream of progressive evolutionary time, Haldane develops a modernist rationale for what will become in our own day “genome time.” He confronts the insignificance of the human timescale with an unblinking gaze, but like many of the poets and artists of his era, he recuperates the experience in aesthetic terms. Where Victorian genre fiction had recuperated Deep Time through problematic teleology and deplorable eugenics, Haldane substitutes self-sufficing beauty:

In his account of the duality of time, Haldane articulates an aesthetic appreciation of genome time, the simultaneous embrace of both human and geological timescales, one tragic, the other “fugue-like” in its beauty. It is anachronistic, of course, to use a term like “genome time” in conjunction with Haldane, but his perspective is one that will become more widespread once genomics emerges. To value the beauty of evolution more than its supposed goal is to join Darwin (rather than neo-Lamarckians) in celebrating the “endless forms most beautiful” in the cycle of life and death. What unites this pioneer of the modern synthesis with a pioneer of modern art like Picasso is an appreciation of the unity between form and content – the beauty of evolutionary time is that its formal shape reveals a fundamental truth about reality. That is why Haldane suggests that an artistic work might give us as much insight into reality as science.

As we saw in Chapter 1, Ian McEwan’s neurosurgeon in the novel Saturday believed much the same thing. He found beauty in the “unimaginable sweep of time” (McEwan 54) because Darwin’s “creation myth” had “the unprecedented bonus of this story happening to be demonstrably true” (54). McEwan has been called a “metamodernist” for the way he repurposes formal solutions from the modernist period for the twenty-first century (James and Seshagiri). But neither Haldane’s nor McEwan’s treatment of evolutionary time reflects the autotelic values of the modernists Aldous Huxley rejected. The difference lies in the homology that all three see between form and content.

Ortega y Gasset’s classic essay from this same decade, “The Dehumanization of Art” (1925), can help clarify the difference between Haldane/Huxley and other modernists. Discussing what he saw as a modernist tendency to subordinate the content of a work of art to its form, Ortega writes, “That can be done only if the artist repudiates reality” (48). I am not sure that Ortega is correct in thinking that modernist writing repudiated reality, but Aldous Huxley clearly shared Ortega’s view.¹⁶ Aldous Huxley was impatient with what he saw as the empty formalism of his modernist peers and emphasized the importance of the “subject-matter” or “content” of his fiction (Serpieters 231). Haldane did not parse modernists with the same passion as Aldous Huxley, but he too thought that the artistic quality of evolution came from what its form revealed about reality, not from the repudiation of reality.

Haldane’s views about the beauty of evolutionary time take on an additional importance because of the bearing they have on his recommendations for science policy. Haldane opens his 1932 collection of essays, Science and Human Life, with a forceful policy statement about the role genetics should play in society:

This forthright advocacy of an instrumental use of the biological sciences on the family, nation, and species echoes attitudes of others in his circle. Here is Russell sounding a similar note: “Science first taught us to create machines; it is now teaching us by Mendelian breeding and experimental embryology to create new plants and animals. There can be little doubt that similar methods will before long give us power, within wide limits, to create new human individuals differing in predetermined ways from the individuals produced by unaided nature” (204). Neither figure shies away from recommending policies that would allow human genetic engineering.

The link between Haldane’s views on time and his recommendation that science guide social policy lies in how what I am calling “genome time” enables scientists to put transient creatures and nearly ageless natural phenomena on the same plane: “A good scientist will be impartial between Mr. Smith, a tape-worm, and the solar system” (Science 2). Haldane calls this stance the “scientific point of view” and characterizes it as ethical in distinctive ways:

Scientific impartiality requires the suppression of emotion, but this dispassionate temperament is not incompatible with the pursuit of a particular kind of beauty. Why? Because the apprehension of scientific beauty, in Haldane’s view, is cultivated by facing both the insignificance and the grandeur of humanity’s place in nature.

The dispassionate character of this impartiality will turn out to be a key to understanding the satiric streak in Aldous Huxley’s fiction. It is the single most prominent characteristic these writers share. In the next section, I turn to Aldous Huxley’s fiction written in the years leading up to Brave New World to show that his satiric vision brought him closer to the scientific point of view than to the standpoint of his modernist literary peers. The stance of a disillusioned ironist, seeing through everyone and everything, was his means of fashioning an aesthetic correlative of the scientific viewpoint he shared with Haldane, Julian Huxley, and Russell. When he came to write Brave New World, an enduring critique of the misuse of science, he did not reject the emotional impartiality that he had cultivated in the twenties. Instead, he turned that emotional impartiality on the scientific viewpoint itself.¹⁷ The resulting satire, so different in tone from his earlier novels, stems from the simplification in style and theme that are the hallmarks of the generic synthesis that we call “dystopia.”

Modernism or Satire?

Aldous Huxley was a perilous man to know in the 1920s. Scraps of his friends’ lives and habits lay scattered throughout his early novels, particularly Crome Yellow (1921), Antic Hay (1923), and Point Counter Point (1928). Lady Ottoline Morrell felt terribly betrayed by the caricature of her and her husband at their country house, Garsington; Huxley’s father was aggrieved by what he called the novelist “botanizing on [his] mother’s grave” (A. Huxley, Letters 224); Lawrence shrugged off being cast in Point Counter Point as the writer Mark Rampion, whom he thought a “boring character” and “a gas-bag,” but he worried Huxley’s wife Maria might have been hurt by the death of a fictional child modeled on their own son’s death (Lawrence, Letters of D. H. Lawrence 766, 791); Wells and Russell seemed not to have minded their ideas about a Rationalist State being burlesqued; nor did the Haldanes, father and son, who appeared in separate novels as obsessed biologists with wandering wives;¹⁸ John Middleton Murry couldn’t have enjoyed being portrayed as a hypocritical philanderer, and Wyndham Lewis must have gnashed his teeth at his portrait as a bombastic, untalented artist-poet; but Nancy Cunard relished her repeated appearances as a heartless siren in her one-time lover’s novels. These and other friends are wickedly satirized in the early fiction, as are the intellectual pretentions, the fashions of the day, prominent politicians, artists, smart society, journalism, advertising, industrialists, urban existence, and above all, the sexual mores of the Bloomsbury set with which the novelist had extensive acquaintance.

It often surprises readers to learn that Huxley was so immersed in the elegantly bohemian world of Bloomsbury. Huxley knew everyone in the circle – not only the friends named previously but also Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, Katherine Mansfield, Lytton Strachey, Roger Fry, Dorothy Brett, and more. He met his wife Maria at Garsington just like his brother Julian, who met his wife Juliette there. Aldous and Maria had an intense, secretive ménage à trois with Mary Hutchinson, a married woman who was already having another affair with Clive Bell; Aldous and Maria duplicated this arrangement with the woman who would become Huxley’s first biographer, Sybille Bedford (Murray 140–47). It seems Maria would seduce women for her husband and bring them to him, a practice that Huxley records in Point Counter Point, where Elinor, the character modeled on his wife, reflects: “[O]n more than one occasion, seeing him look admiringly at some young woman or other, she had gone out of her way to establish for him the personal contact which he would never have been able to establish for himself” (78).¹⁹

Huxley’s surprising involvement in the Bloomsbury world is significant for several reasons. First, it alters the image some people have of Huxley, chiefly those who only know him from Brave New World. Neither in his personal life nor in his fiction was he the didactic moralist many take him for. Rather, moral relativity is the watchword of his early novels. Second, Huxley knew the British literary modernists well, which accentuates the conscious choice he made to take up an alternative stance toward modernity. During the teens and 1920s, Huxley witnessed the full flowering of what literary historians once confidently labeled “modernism” in the fiction of Richardson, Joyce, Woolf, and Mansfield. Although today this limited canon of writers is regarded as an inadequate account of global modernism with its diverse artistic responses to uneven economic development, colonialism, gender, race, and sexuality, this group of Huxley’s immediate predecessors and peers establishes the contrast I am drawing.²⁰ Huxley sought a different approach toward the modern from the kind of formal innovations in language and structure that these authors emphasized. Huxley wanted to be modern, but he wanted no part of the version of modernism he saw around him.

The alternative nature of Huxley’s ambition was apparent from the start. An anonymous reviewer of his first novel, the roman à clef Crome Yellow, called it “a Cubist Peacock,” a nice aperçu, for it captures both the attempt to be modern and the novel’s homage to an older satiric tradition (Williams-Ellis 60). The Nation grasps the modernity of the novel’s scientific views, mentioning Wells’s Rationalist State and Freud’s concept of repression but is more interested in the book’s distance from the works of literary modernists, commenting that Huxley “lives in a different world from that of D. H. Lawrence or James Joyce or Dorothy Richardson” (Lewisohn 63). Of course, Huxley did not live in a different world; he just depicted the milieux he shared with the Bloomsbury circle in a very different way.

Huxley’s next novel, Antic Hay, is a roman à clef too, but its form is more disjunctive. The novel shifts scenes and perspectives at will, cross-cutting a set of stories that range in tone from the ridiculous (a scheme to get rich on inflatable underwear), to the romantic (helpless love for a femme fatale), to the sordid (seducing a friend’s wife, then sharing her around), to the bathetic (a failed art exhibition), to the phantasmagoric (a nighttown episode at the burlesque), to the tragic (suicide of one character and manic despair of another). In its formal disjunctiveness, the novel participates in one of the durable characteristics of satire, its refusal to be constrained by a unified structure.²¹ Writing to his father (A. Huxley to Leonard Huxley, Letters), who disliked the novel’s satiric tone, Huxley justified his method both as a reflection of the modern world and as an artistic experiment:

In his next novel, Those Barren Leaves (1925), Huxley puts a similar defense of genre mixing in the mouth of a female novelist: “I’m trying to do something new – a chemical compound of all the categories. Lightness and tragedy and loveliness and wit and fantasy and realism and irony and sentiment all combined” (46). The disillusioned irony, the sexual frankness, the lacerating exposure of self-delusion and posturing were above all a way to be modern, Huxley’s way, and one that his generation recognized as its own. Isaiah Berlin remembers how the “social and moral courage” of Huxley’s fiction galvanized him and his friends: “[M]embers of my generation were assisted to find themselves by novelists, poets and critics,” adducing not only Huxley but (beautifully in the context of this chapter) J. B. S. Haldane, Wells, and Russell (144).

Point Counter Point is the masterpiece of this group of novels. Like Huxley’s other novels of the twenties, it has an ensemble cast, but a pair of characters, a novelist, Philip, and his wife, Elinor, who are transparent versions of Aldous and Maria Huxley, create a central thread in the narrative. Around the story of their relationship – his writing and affairs, her susceptibility to the abusive sexuality of the rising star of the British fascist party (modeled on Oswald Mosley), and the sudden death of their child from meningitis – other stories about friends are interwoven more plausibly than in any of Huxley’s novels to date.

Three points about this novel can help characterize Huxley’s stance toward science in the years leading up to Brave New World. First, Philip’s ironic detachment from the world around him had become, by the time of Point Counter Point, Huxley’s signature way of being modern. Philip’s wife Elinor blames it for an emotional aridity in his fiction: “[F]or the sake of the novelist he might be, she wished he could break his habit of impersonality and learn to live with the intuitions and feelings and instincts as well as with the intellect” (Point Counter Point 78).

Second, Philip compensates for his emotional impersonality by relying on his protean intelligence. Like a chameleon, he can sympathize with any position. His analytic gifts allow him to grasp the logic of the most extreme attitudes and beliefs: “It was so easy for him to be almost anybody” (193). The ability to inhabit other perspectives is the key to his new way of writing and his response to his age. Huxley achieves this multiplicity of perspectives by relying on the emotional impartiality that was the hallmark of the scientific viewpoint. It is what allows him to skewer himself and his friends with equal impartiality. What Haldane says about the scientist scrutinizing “Mr. Smith, a tape-worm, and the solar system” with the same impersonal gaze, regardless of whether the scientist wants to improve the life of one, eradicate the other, or understand the astronomical behavior of the third, describes Huxley’s satiric method too (Science 2). Here is the novelist treating a fetus growing inside the womb with the same emotional impartiality that one might use for a tapeworm:

Third, Rampion’s frequent attacks on emotional impartiality and modern science, reminiscent of Lawrence’s impatience with evolutionary theory, do not cancel out – in fact, coexist comfortably with – Huxley’s rejection of moral certainties.²² Rampion is a writer turned artist who celebrates instinct, the life of the emotions, and “noble savagery.” In one diatribe, Rampion denounces two of the bugbears of Huxley’s later dystopia, Alfred Mond and Henry Ford. Those apostles of “science, progress, and human happiness” will destroy “initiative and creativeness” and replace “all the vital and fundamental things in human nature” with “ready-made and unindividual amusements” (Point Counter Point 298–99). These are the Savage’s objections to Mustapha Mond, the World Controller in Brave New World, and the similarities between Rampion and the Savage’s attitudes should be a clue that Huxley does not unequivocally endorse the Savage’s position. This parallel is not surprising when we remember Huxley’s winking allusion to Lawrence in that later novel: the Savage comes from a reservation near Taos, New Mexico, the place where Lawrence lived near the end of his life. What Rampion wants instead of progress and industrialization is to live instinctually and to trust in one’s physical and emotional being. The emotional impartiality that allows scientists to examine humans and tapeworms with the same neutral objectivity is anathema to him. Huxley agrees with Rampion about Mond and industrialization, disagrees with his rejection of evolution and modern biology, yet the novelist satirizes both positions with equal glee.²³

Philip understands his intellectual flexibility as cognate with the modern relativity of values. He sees all sides. At extreme moments, he wonders if the “essential character of the self consisted precisely in that liquid and undeformable ubiquity; in that capacity to espouse all contours and yet remain unfixed in any form” (Point Counter Point 194). If this is the satiric self, it is also how the Haldane–Huxley set understood the modern scientific self, a viewpoint that can see all sides objectively and eviscerate them all with emotional impartiality.

Brave New World, Huxley’s next novel, represents a radical paring down and distillation of Philip’s urge to see all sides of an issue. In this story, the sides have been reduced to two stark opposites: a world state that bestows universal peace, stability, and freedom from poverty, disease, and suffering, on the one hand, and a society that values free will, art, imagination, scientific inquiry, and the human spirit, on the other. Huxley tries to give each side its due in the chapters where the Savage debates the World Controller, but the contest is uneven and most readers have taken the Savage’s side as their own. As a result, the very phrase “brave new world” has become the watchword of those who caution against scientific hubris. But that was not Huxley’s point, and an oversimplification of the book has made Huxley famous. Most people know nothing else about him.

Dystopian Synthesis

Brave New World is another experiment in satire, but it is far more unified in tone and theme than any of Huxley’s earlier novels. It no longer juxtaposes discordant genres but blends its multiple satiric intentions into a powerful gestalt. It combines the simplicity of a moral tale for the young with the force of a jeremiad against contemporary society. The resulting satire has more affinities with scientific modernity than with literary modernism.

The gestalt owes much of its success to the dystopian synthesis of utopia and naturalism, to return to Wegner’s insight. Brave New World’s limitations and strengths both stem from this source. Utopia, a common vehicle for satire, is totalizing and narratively static. There is little to propel the story other than the critical comparison it draws between a degenerate present and an ideal future.²⁴ Description is its métier … and its Achilles heel. The protagonists are often flat characters, naïfs like the Savage, and the denizens of the new world – typically a guide, a love interest, and an opponent – serve transparent narrative purposes. The intellectual clarity of its message depends on this kind of simplification.

Naturalism, on the other hand, specializes in relentless plots, which grind down the characters under forces beyond their control. As Richard Chase puts it, “the naturalistic novel took a bleakly pessimistic view when considering the ability of the individual to control his fate” (186). Émile Zola, Henrik Ibsen, George Gissing, and Theodore Dreiser, in very different ways, thought of themselves as writing scientific examinations of the ills of society.²⁵ External forces – poverty, sexual oppression, syphilis, alcoholism, drug abuse, racism, and other forms of injustice – often seem to determine the fate of their protagonists. Social Darwinism was an important component of this “scientific” understanding of fiction’s purpose. Description is grittily realistic, far more so than in utopian fiction. Characterization also relies on realistic conventions. The protagonist is trapped within the belly of the beast, not a visitor from another world. The tormented response of the characters produces the effect of an agonized inward life, although at times the protagonist can seem so fully under the control of external forces as to be little more than a miserable puppet of fate. The power of the work also depends on a vast simplification of human experience, but the desolate depiction of reality sometimes masks how much has been simplified.

Dystopia flourished in the twentieth century by merging elements of these opposed genres, utopia and naturalism, into a new synthesis. The genre combined accounts of a future, alternative society (utopia) with a strong narrative line that featured an individual struggling against overwhelming conditions (naturalism). The inequality of this struggle enhances our sympathy with the solitary rebel, lending realism to the protagonist’s desperate subterfuges, especially since we fear that these rebels are doomed to failure.

The synthesis of utopia with naturalism is dialectical. The pessimism of the naturalist genre dialectically negates the idealism of utopia as it generates a nightmare vision of what the future might hold. Yet, as Jameson emphasizes, dystopia carries forward the revolutionary energies of utopia in that very negation. In this respect, the dystopian synthesis might seem to differ fundamentally from the modern synthesis in biology. The connection, however, comes from the particular form that dialectic takes in Brave New World. Huxley’s novel incorporates and sublates the emotional impartiality that characterized the modern conception of science for the Haldane–Huxley circle and generalizes it to the entire totalitarian future. In doing so, Huxley establishes a convention that the genre will frequently honor – the internalization of this emotional impartiality in the novel’s antagonist (the World Controller in Brave New World). The debate between the impassioned Savage and the dispassionate World Commander in chapters 16 and 17 of Brave New World (which was itself modeled on the Grand Inquisitor chapter in Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov) has become paradigmatic of the didactic core in much dystopian fiction: think of the debates between Winston and O’Brien in Nineteen Eighty-Four or Montag and Captain Beatty in Fahrenheit 451. Witnessing the hypocrisy of characters like the Controller is infuriating, which means that the overall tone of novels in the genre is anything but emotionally neutral. All the same, emotional impartiality contributes formally as well as thematically to the genre because the impact of the totalitarian future depends on the cold logic of extrapolation from contemporary trends. There is an instrumental rationality in the prophetic gaze that the novelist turns on the present.

The biological nightmares of Brave New World span the entire human life cycle from conception, maturation, and adulthood to death. Conception relies on entirely artificial means: eugenic selection of parents, pre-implantation genetic screening, in vitro fertilization, embryo sorting, selective sterilization, the Bokanovsky Process (or cloning), ectogenesis, and chemical and x-ray assaults on the embryo. From the nursery through the end of one’s school days, the child receives extensive behavioral conditioning in accordance with the theories of Pavlov and J. B. Watson, author of Behaviorism (1924). In adulthood, daily doses of mood-altering drugs and antiaging therapies are provided free to all. Finally, there is hospice care for the seriously ill and euthanasia for everyone at the age of sixty. Of course, other aspects of the world state are objects of satire too: advertising; commercialism; industrialization; films that border on virtual reality; the erasure of history, art, and literature; the attack on the family and romantic love; the suppression of authentic science; and the use of sexuality and pseudoreligious experiences to release disruptive social energies. But biological concerns hold a preeminent place in Huxley’s mind. In the “Foreword” he wrote for the 1946 reprinting of the novel, he notes: “The only scientific advances to be specifically described are those involving the application to human beings of the results of future research in biology, physiology, and psychology. It is only by means of the sciences of life that the quality of life can be radically changed” (ix – x).

Huxley’s dystopia has had enormous cultural impact. Every one of the biotechnologies Huxley described has been held up by subsequent commentators as an emblem of science run amok. Procedures that are today routine, such as pre-implantation genetic screening, in vitro fertilization, and hospice care, were greeted by their critics as heralding a “brave new world.” So too, today, are interventions such as psychotropic and performance-enhancing drugs, and euthanasia for the terminally ill. The most severe condemnation has been reserved for some of the biotechnologies that remain on the horizon, such as human reproductive cloning and ectogenesis.²⁶ All have been accused of being examples of a “brave new biology.”

The most viscerally disturbing of the genetic marvels described in the book is cloning. Bokanovsky’s Process involves the artificial budding of the developing embryo to produce multiple identical twins, anywhere from eight to ninety-six from a single fertilized cell. The public today associates cloning with the technique of somatic cell nuclear transfer used in animal cloning and stem cell research. This was the procedure employed to create the most famous cloned animal, Dolly the sheep. But embryo splitting, which is how identical twins occur in nature, is another method of producing a clone. When induced in the lab, it involves manually dividing the embryo at the eight-cell stage into two separate embryos of four cells each. Bokanovsky’s Process can be thought of as an early vision of how embryo splitting might be induced. Huxley imagines a procedure in which the eight-cell embryo is subjected to successive treatments with radiation and alcohol, which cause the embryo to split in two (or “bud”) multiple times. The process Huxley describes can be used to induce embryogenesis in some plants, but it sounds unthinkably brutal when applied to the human embryo. But the potential insult to the developing fetus from such harsh treatment is irrelevant to the social planners in Huxley’s future because they use the process only on the lower echelons of society.

The results of Bokanovsky’s Process are large cohorts of identical humans, suitable for all the menial tasks an industrial society requires. These clones repel the Savage more than any other aspect of biology in the world state – only female sexuality provokes an equally emotional response. The fact that Huxley opposes sexual repression – in his own life and in society too – might suggest that he is treating the Savage’s instinctual revulsion from clones with similar irony and that Huxley actually favors a more impartial assessment of the technology. Both Russell and Haldane did. The Savage’s repugnance arises involuntarily the first time he sees the clones when he is so repelled he becomes physically ill. Thematically, it serves the interest of the novel’s attack on mechanization; Huxley associates cloning with a Fordist model of production.²⁷ In the Central London Hatchery, clones are produced on a conveyor belt, like cars rolled off an assembly line. The linkage with mass production has proved so powerful that in subsequent years the notion of cloning has become synonymous with “manufacturing” a human being.

The Savage’s response goes far beyond objecting to the procedure. He is overwhelmed with loathing and fear. His emotional response is akin to xenophobia or racism. The imagery evokes mindless drones, the horror of hive societies. Observe his reaction in this description of cloned children:

They are not human beings but insects meant to evoke all the repulsion of maggots. Twice more, in a passage as full of irrational repugnance, the Savage compares them to maggots, and a third time he calls them lice. These are human beings, however, and cloned humans, even if intentionally impaired as these are, would deserve the same respect for persons accorded to twins today. Only the Savage’s sexual self-loathing and flagellation at the end of the novel equals the excessive emotional charge he feels toward these clones.

Leon Kass has urged that public policy should listen to this feeling of revulsion toward genetic creations like chimeras and clones. In his much-cited article, “The Wisdom of Repugnance,” Kass specifically invokes Brave New World as an example of how instinctive or spontaneous repugnance should guide us in deciding whether to allow genetic engineering of humans (18).²⁸ Steven Pinker, in a powerful rejoinder, inveighs against Kass’s “disconcerting habit of treating fiction as fact” (29). The problem, Pinker continues, is that “Brave New World, a work of fiction, is treated as inerrant prophesy. Cloning is confused with resurrecting the dead or mass-producing babies. Longevity becomes ‘immortality,’ improvement becomes ‘perfection,’ the screening for disease genes becomes ‘designer babies’ or even ‘reshaping the species’” (31). Pinker is right. Fiction is not inerrant prediction, and if it is to play a role in bioethics, it must be to enrich our understanding of complex problems, not simplify them into a one-dimensional moral.

The Savage’s horror at the repeated faces of twin after twin constitutes more of a critique of mass production in Huxley’s day than of future reproductive technologies. It resembles Rampion’s (and Lawrence’s) irrational condemnation of biology rather than Philip’s emotional impartiality. If the Savage’s sexual repression is attributable to the primal scene in his youth of witnessing his mother in bed with her lover, as the novel clearly establishes, then his emotional response to cloning, which also reaches a peak at his mother’s bedside, should be read as psychopathology too. In any event, it should not be taken as a warning about advances in genetics, as so many commentators have done. Tom Moylan identifies this kind of misreading as a violation of the spirit of the genre itself. “Formally and politically … the dystopian text refuses a functionalist or reformist perspective…. No single aberration can be privileged as the one to be fixed so that life in the enclosed status quo can easily resume” (xii).

Huxley would agree. “Science in itself is morally neutral,” he said in the same year as Brave New World was published; “it becomes good or evil according as it is applied” (rpt. in Bradshaw, The Hidden Huxley 114). To use the power of science to produce a society such as the World Controller’s future is a more far-reaching evil than any practice or technology that can be isolated as problematic. That is how Huxley’s satire complicates our understanding – not by warning against new reproductive technologies but by dramatizing how science could be misused by a society in search of safety and stability.

Satire is a capricious weapon, however. Its sharp edges cut in many directions. Huxley kept rediscovering this point throughout his career. His early novels wounded friends that he had not expected to hurt. The thrust of Brave New World surprised him in a different way. The dystopian synthesis narrowed the options it presented to two choices, neither of which he meant to be acceptable. Science without a conscience was unacceptable; a world with art, literature, family, and God, but at the price of poverty, disease, war, and mental illness was equally unacceptable. Huxley lamented that readers took his novel’s simplifications so much to heart. They accepted the choices they were given as the only available options: “The Savage is offered only two alternatives,” Huxley commented in his 1946 “Foreword,” “an insane life in Utopia, or the life of a primitive in an Indian village, a life more human in some respects, but in others hardly less queer and abnormal” (vii). Perhaps he assumed readers would see through this false opposition. After all, it is the World Controller who insists that these options are the only possible alternatives: “God isn’t compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness,” Mustapha Mond claims. “You must make your choice” (Brave New World, 159). Mond is wrong, however. Society does not have to choose between such draconian options. Mond’s logic is the either/or that an authoritarian state uses to justify its rule. But other alternatives exist beyond the covers of a dystopian novel. The wise use of technology is the option Huxley preferred: “It rests with us and our descendants to decide whether we shall use the unprecedented power which science gives us for good or bad purposes. It is in our hands to choose wisely or unwisely” (rpt. in Bradshaw, The Hidden Huxley 114).

In 1932 Huxley the satirist was pleased by the prospect of a novel that offered its protagonist an impossible choice. “At the time the book was written,” Huxley recalled, “this idea, that human beings are given free will in order to choose between insanity on the one hand and lunacy on the other, was one I found amusing and regarded as quite possibly true” (“Foreword,” vii–viii). The moral relativist of the twenties lives on even when the dystopian synthesis mandates a despairing end. “At the close, of course,” Huxley continued, the Savage’s “native Penitente-ism reasserts its authority and he ends in maniacal self-torture and despairing suicide. ‘And so they died miserably ever after’ – much to the reassurance of the amused, Pyrrhonic aesthete who was the author of the fable” (viii). A Pyrrhic victory is an engagement won at horrific cost. When Huxley calls himself in retrospect a Pyrrhonic aesthete, he acknowledges that there was no earth he would not scorch for his art, no person or idea he would not sacrifice on the altar of satire. It is ironic to realize that the moral relativism and emotional impartiality of an amused, Pyrrhonic satirist has become the touchstone of present-day moralists who want to halt some forms of genetic engineering.

Commentators who invoke the specter of Brave New World to argue against one biotechnology or another (and they are legion) are offering the counsel of Mustapha Mond. They suggest that if we go down a particular path, it will inevitably lead to the kind of dehumanized world Huxley depicts. This rhetorical tactic gains power from one of the key features of the dystopian synthesis: the determinism of its plots. The solitary rebel is doomed from the start. Hence, the argument that we must not go down a certain path gains added force not only from Huxley’s powerful imagery but also from our sense that this kind of story (dystopia’s story) rarely ends well. The allusion to dystopia by commentators on science supports a slippery slope argument with cultural evocations that few readers will spend the time to analyze. By invoking Brave New World as if its message were simple and unambiguous, commentators either show their ignorance of literature or rely on their audience’s inability to see through a devil’s bargain.

At the outset of his career as a satirist, Huxley predicted that his age would produce a new synthesis, which would look to irony, the comedy of Rabelais, Goya, and Daumier, to produce an artistic whole out of the ruins of the modern world. “The new synthesis that will reassemble, in an artistic whole, the shattered values of our post-war world, the synthesis that will reflect the disintegration in an artistic unity, will surely be a comic synthesis. The social tragedy of these last years has gone too far and in its nature and origin is too profoundly stupid to be represented tragically” (“The Modern Spirit^” 33). The synthesis that unified the field of biology, in one quarter, and gave birth to the genre of dystopia in another, was modern in ways that twenty-first-century readers do not always understand. The unflinching honesty, the confidence that a unified vision would emerge from rational scrutiny, demystification, and emotional impartiality, was strangely hopeful. It forms a striking contrast to the method of some of his modernist compatriots who shored up fragments against the ruins. Both types of modern synthesis – Haldane’s and Aldous Huxley’s – offered “resources of hope” for their time, to use Raymond Williams’s resonant phrase, modes of thinking and being in the world that had not previously been available.

Suppose you were a science fiction fan, a Trekkie, and a transhumanist; you once paid to attend a seminar with Raël, knew all about Extropy back in the day, and subscribed to Longevity Meme Newsletter; you have read articles about an “immortality gene” and were thrilled to see Science publish a genomewide association study in 2010 identifying 150 genes that might improve your chances of living to 100; and you practice extreme caloric restriction while spending a fortune on dietary supplements. Over the years, you have zealously collected the following quotes but have forgotten the sources. Which of them do you think came from classic 1950s works of science fiction and which from publications by distinguished scientists, doctors, philosophers, and law professors?

1. 1. We, or our descendants, will cease to be human in the sense in which we now understand that idea.

2. 2. By the standards of evolution, it will be cataclysmic – instantaneous. It has already begun.

3. 3. The new immortals, in the decisive sense, would not be like us at all.

4. 4. Man will go into history along with the Java ape man, the Neanderthal beast man, and the Cro-Magnon Primitive.

5. 5. Unlike the saber-toothed tiger … Homo sapiens would spawn its own successors by fast-forwarding evolution.

6. 6. With the great lizards, with the sabertooth tiger and the bison, [humanity’s] day is done.

7. 7. We will see them as a threat to us, and thus seek to imprison or simply kill them before they kill us.

8. 8. We evolved. We’re the next step up.

The odd numbered quotations are by prominent academics: John Harris, Alliance Professor of Bioethics at the University of Manchester law school; Leon R. Kass, Harding Professor of Social Thought at the University of Chicago; Gregory Stock, former director of the Program on Medicine, Technology and Society at UCLA medical school; and George Annas, Warren Distinguished Professor at Boston University. The even numbered quotations are by some of the most revered figures in science fiction (SF): Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein, A. E. van Vogt, and Theodore Sturgeon.¹

The boundary between science fiction and fact is often at issue in contemporary debates over the “posthuman.” Genetic enhancement and longevity research provoke fervent debate between those who favor such research and others who think it is wrong to tamper with fundamental aspects of the human. Each side thinks that distinguishing realistic possibilities from wild speculations is a priority. Comically, though, each side uses the epithet “science fiction” as a way of trivializing the positions of the other while proclaiming that the research they cite is on the verge of transforming human nature and that the future scenarios they describe are plausible and impending. This chapter brings the bioethical debate about posthumanism into contact with a massive, culturally significant body of writing on the topic, popular science fiction from the mid-twentieth through the twenty-first centuries. The nightmares of science fiction haunt the bioethical imagination, exerting a pervasive but unexamined influence on its analyses. But the failure of bioethicists to examine the images, metaphors, and storylines of the science fiction that they so frequently invoke distorts their findings and recommendations.

As is perhaps unsurprising, almost none of the people who employ SF as an epithet have the foggiest idea of what they are talking about. Most give no sign of ever having read any science fiction, unless you count Brave New World, which everyone invokes without fail. In addition to Huxley’s dystopia, they may have read well-publicized mainstream dystopias by established literary figures, such as Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go; most have seen a few dystopian movies (Gattaca is the most frequently mentioned); but there is little evidence that they have delved into other forms of SF. Hence, you see over and over again the mistaken notion that SF warns against the consequences of biotechnology. Some does, of course, particularly dystopian fictions. But dystopia is only a small sector of the science fiction galaxy, and the nightmare worlds of Brave New World and Oryx and Crake are the exceptions, not the rule, in the larger universe of SF. Popular cinema is a misleading indicator too, since the film industry relies on thriller conventions of conspiracy and disaster far more than written forms of SF. Ronald Green conveys the typical assumption when he writes, “the take-home lesson about human gene modification [in science fiction] is wholly negative” (7).² Nothing could be farther from the case.

Science fiction is overwhelmingly positive about the possibility of transforming the human. The titles of two famous works in the field capture the spirit in which SF approaches the topic: Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End and Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human. These works, like so many others, look forward to the day when humans leave the childhood of their species behind and become more than human.³ Let me emphasize one point, however. The interest of SF does not lie in its “take-home lessons,” whether positive or negative. Nor does the interest lie in whether the genre possesses aesthetic merit. Rather, the interest for policy lies in what the genre shows about the historical contexts that produced it and in the cultural attitudes the genre reveals. Thus, it is important to focus on what Darko Suvin identifies as the “popular, ‘low,’ or plebeian literary production of various times,” the “paraliterature” of SF (vii), as I do here. Suvin writes:

It matters whether the people who dismiss science fiction actually understand the question at hand. The erroneous belief that the genre is largely negative about biological enhancement mischaracterizes a significant strand in our culture.

The ease with which accusations of writing science fiction fit the rhetorical purposes of bioethicists is revealing. It illustrates the pervasiveness of what Istvan Csicsery-Ronay has called “science-fictional habits of mind” (2). The reach of technology into every aspect of our lives has so saturated consciousness “that we no longer treat sf as purely a genre-engine producing formulaic effects, but rather as a kind of awareness we might call science-fictionality, a mode of response that frames and tests experiences as if they were aspects of a work of science fiction” (2, italics in original). Others have pushed this point further. Colin Milburn argues that the field of nanotechnology “should be viewed as simultaneously a science and a science fiction” (25) not only because it employs many of the same rhetorical tropes, conventions, and narrative strategies in its promotional literature and venture capital funding proposals but also because the speculative worlds it imagines as a consequence of as yet uninvented nanotechnology help drive much of the research it undertakes. As a consequence, nanoscientists often have to labor to disentangle their field from charges that its claims smack of science fiction. Their efforts are self-defeating, however. Milburn demonstrates at length that the very “rhetorical strategies intended to distance their science from the negative associations of science fiction … end up collapsing the distinction, reinforcing the science fiction aspects of nano at the same time as they rescue its scientific legitimacy” (24).

Much of the ethical discourse surrounding genetic enhancement is inflected with “science-fictional habits of mind.”⁴ My point is not that the science of genetics is itself constitutively related to science fiction, as Milburn argues about nanotechnology, but that some of the ethical discourse surrounding genetic enhancement is. The bioethicists examined here rely on sweeping analogies and engage in the kind of extrapolation that is the hallmark of SF. Their underlying syntax is the question “what if?” They ask us to “frame and test experiences as if they were aspects of science fiction” (Csicsery-Ronay) while enjoying the trust accorded to nonfiction. They constitute a rhetorical genre of science writing, the nonfiction cousin of science fiction, while borrowing their authority from the social sciences.⁵ We should be wary of drawing ethical conclusions from science fictional habits of mind without acknowledging their character and understanding their provenance.

The ethical and policy discourse on posthumanism differs from the critical reflection on biopower and biopolitics that dominates literary studies of the topic. Literary theorists of the posthuman typically trace their lineage to a few foundational sources: Foucault’s late lectures on biopower, Donna Haraway’s writing on transgressive, hybrid creatures (both cyborg and transgenic), and N. Katherine Hayles’s work on the interpenetration of the cybernetic with the human. By and large, this body of thought wants to break down the boundaries between fiction and cultural analysis, which is very much not the case in bioethics. For example, literary critic Cary Wolfe insists that we must challenge the norms of critical analysis, putting into question categories of rationality before we can come to terms with the posthuman: “the nature of thought itself must change if it is to be posthumanist” (xvi). Wolfe’s work draws on animal studies, gender and race theory, Lyotard and Derrida on the nonhuman, Luhmann’s systems theory, as well as Foucault’s influential texts on biopower. Similarly, Bruce Clarke invokes Gregory Bateson’s remark that “the whole of logic would have to be reconstructed for recursiveness” (qtd. in Clarke 5) in justification for his belief that only systems theory can come to terms with the radical potential of posthuman metamorphosis. This vein of theory has become virtually hegemonic in literary and cultural studies of the posthuman.

By contrast, bioethicists and policy experts mean something quite different when they speak of Our Posthuman Future, to use the title of Francis Fukuyama’s 2002 book. Bioethicists are more likely to draw on economists, social scientists, and moral philosophers than Foucault, Haraway, Lyotard, Derrida, or Luhmann. Although few literary critics pay much attention to bioethics as a field, it is a powerful discourse in today’s society, influencing important policy decisions in government agencies, medical care, human subjects research, pharmaceutical corporations, agricultural regulations, and much more.⁶ The debate in this area turns on issues of human dignity, freedom of choice, personal autonomy, patient privacy, and informed consent, not the deconstruction of the subject. For Fukuyama, posthumanism is what you get when you threaten our shared “human nature” (129), the “human essence” (150) that “entitles every member of the species to a higher moral status than the rest of the natural world” (160). Hence, the stakes are high in suggesting a kinship between Fukuyama’s conception of the posthuman and science fiction.

In the pages that follow, I trace two different phases of SF’s engagement with the posthuman, showing how those phases were responses to their different historical moments and what they reveal about attitudes toward transforming the human. During WW II and the decade afterward, the so-called golden age of SF, a whole raft of short stories and novels dealt with the advent of a new species of human, what today we would refer to as the posthuman.⁷ A second wave, equally remarkable for its coherence and prominence, began appearing in the late 1970s and 1980s, culminating in the years immediately preceding the millennium. The typical plot form in both eras involves the persecution of the emerging minority species by a terrified majority, the soon-to-be extinct Homo sapiens. Invariably, evolutionary change is depicted as sudden and teleological in character, resulting in a decisive step forward to a higher evolutionary stage. I conclude the chapter by discussing another wave of texts, this time speculative nonfiction works published since 2002. These works fall into two groups, jeremiads by opponents of enhancement, Francis Fukuyama, Leon R. Kass, and Michael J. Sandel – three scholars who served together on the President’s Council on Bioethics. The second group endorses biological enhancement. They write in a genre of futurology for which we lack a name, but we might refer to these works as “encomia” or “anticipations” after H. G. Wells’s book of that name, which inaugurated the twentieth-century tradition of scientific futurism (Wagar).⁸ With titles like Redesigning Humans (Stock 2002), Radical Evolution (Garreau 2004), and Enhancing Evolution (Harris 2007), these anticipations inflect bioethics with “the ludic pleasures of estrangement” characteristic of science fiction (Suvin ix).

Around 1953

In Anglo-American SF, 1953 was a banner year. The culmination of important trends in hard SF that took their impetus from John W. Campbell’s editorship of the pulp magazine Astounding Science Fiction, the year also marked the beginning of important trends in paperback publication of SF and the professionalization of its writers. Ballantine Books published the first of its science fiction original paperbacks in 1953, Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants, and ACE followed that same year with its own line of SF originals (Gary K. Wolfe 105–6). The Hugo Award for the best science fiction novel of the year was first given in 1953 to Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man, beating out Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and other classics of the genre, including three of the books considered here: Clarke’s Childhood’s End, Sturgeon’s More Than Human, and Lewis Padgett’s Mutant (all but Bester’s novel published by Ballantine). Van Vogt had inaugurated the spate of fiction about mutants in 1940 with Slan, and Heinlein had published the stories that would become the fix-ups Beyond This Horizon and Methuselah’s Children in Astounding in 1941 and 1942, while Padgett’s “Baldie stories,” the core of Mutant, appeared in the same magazine in 1945. But 1953 may serve as a symbolic climax for the first wave of SF about evolutionary change in humans. The publication of Watson and Crick’s landmark article describing the double helix structure of DNA in April 1953 appears to have prompted SF writers to shift their focus when writing about evolution in ways that will shortly become clear, and by the end of the decade, the genre had moved on to other concerns.

I focus exclusively on Anglo-American SF for two complementary reasons. First, the genre fiction in this line was directly shaped by the emphasis of the pulp magazines of the 1940s with which the name Campbell is closely associated. Campbell emphasized “hard science” in his magazine and encouraged writers who speculated about a posthuman species to ground their work in current understandings of evolution. Mark McGurl has noted something important about the genre status of these works: “the term genre fiction (its science fiction and horror variants in particular) … names those literary forms willing to risk artistic ludicrousness in their representation of the inhumanly large and long” (539). That ludicrousness makes the juxtaposition with policy analysis all the more startling. Second, the threat of totalitarianism – first from the fascist right, and during the Cold War years, from the communist left – shaped the rebellious youth culture that consumed American pulp science fiction in ways that I shall shortly explore.

In the 1940s, the lack of knowledge about DNA’s role in evolution left SF writers with two chief mechanisms for imagining genetic change: eugenics and mutation. Eugenics had loomed large in the American consciousness in the first half of the twentieth century with debate about selective breeding, sterilization, or extermination of the unfit intensifying in the 1930s as Nazi eugenics campaigns drew increasing notice. After WW II, when word spread about the effects of radiation on survivors of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, mutations caused by nuclear warfare became an obvious plot device for fiction about evolution.

For Heinlein, eugenics was the method of choice for changing the human species. A committed social Darwinist, a libertarian who championed freedom of the individual above all other values, and a believer (like Wells before him) in the innate aristocracy of the gifted few, Heinlein vigorously advocated only “positive” eugenics, which encouraged selective breeding through incentives rather than “negative” eugenic policies involving coerced sterilization or extermination. Self-interest and merciless competition for survival would weed out the unfit, or so Heinlein’s rugged heroes proclaimed in story after story.⁹

In his antipathy for coercive measures, Heinlein was in step with the growth and eventual dominance of “reform eugenics” in England and America from the mid-1930s onward (Kevles 164–75; Stern 3–4, 16–18). Beyond This Horizon imagines a future society where the best genetic lines are encouraged by Moderators from the Eugenics Board who employ family pedigrees and chromosome charts to encourage “star lines” to interbreed. The only genetic interventions that occur involve pre-implantation screening of embryos to select the optimum combination of genes. In imagining this future office, Heinlein reflected the cutting edge of reform in eugenics; the 1940s saw a shift away from large-scale better-breeding programs and racial hygiene, which had already become tainted by association with German eugenics, toward marriage counseling, family planning, and beginning in 1946, genetic counseling (Kevles 254). Methuselah’s Children similarly features incentive programs for people from chosen genetic lines marrying one another. The novel imagines the establishment of the Howard Foundation in 1875 to support a selective breeding program for longevity. By 2136, when the novel opens, the hero Lazarus Long is 215; although we learn later that he possesses a rare favorable mutation, others in the family lived almost as long.

Suspicion of genetic engineering runs throughout the first wave of SF novels, coexisting uneasily with enthusiasm for the arrival of a posthuman stage. Both Heinlein and van Vogt inveigh against tampering directly with the germ line. Although their genetics fiction was written in 1940–42, before most of the Nazi medical atrocities had become public knowledge, the antipathy toward genetic engineering seems aimed at warding off the specter of German eugenics. Nazi coercive measures clearly ran against Heinlein’s grain. Beyond This Horizon contains a long, clumsy passage of exposition recounting the horrors of the genetic experiments of past centuries, when the “race acquired the techniques of artificial selection without knowing what to select” (26). No free, individualistic society, we are told, would tolerate engineering humans for particular traits, which would lead either to homogenization of the species, or its opposite, overspecialization. “Only under absolutism could the genetic experiments … have been performed, for they required a total indifference to the welfare of individuals” (27). Similarly, van Vogt’s Slan alludes to the infamous “blood libel” against Jews – the slans are accused of kidnapping human babies for experiments designed to create more slans – a libel that dates back at least to the middle ages but was given new life by National Socialism. To dispel such charges against his slans, van Vogt repudiates the existence of any means of artificially tampering with genes. A crucial turn in the plot reveals that “All slans are natural mutations” (175), not the product of experimentation.

A second reason for the avoidance of genetic engineering was confidence that evolutionary pressures alone would do the trick. This confidence in natural selection, though, reveals its own set of ideological confusions: like so many people of the time, SF writers saw evolutionary change as teleological, a progressive movement toward ever higher stages of life. Nature was viewed as working according to a plan, purposefully directing human evolution toward a superior species. “Our mutation wasn’t due for another thousand years” (140), a character remarks in Padgett’s Mutant, and another explains that radioactive fallout “brought us telepaths into being ahead of our normal mutation time” (146). Sentences such as these could have appeared in virtually any of the SF from the period that dealt with evolution.

A related confusion led authors to envision species change as sudden, occurring over one generation. Recall the Arthur C. Clarke quote with which this article began (#2 in the list at the beginning of the chapter): “it will be cataclysmic – instantaneous” (181). The passage in Childhood’s End continues: “yours is the last generation of Homo sapiens…. You have given birth to your successors” (181). In these novels, bewildered parents discover that they have nurtured mutants with dramatic new powers. It happens not only in Clarke’s Childhood’s End, but also van Vogt’s Slan, Heinlein’s Beyond This Horizon, Sturgeon’s More Than Human, Padgett’s Mutant, and Judith Merril’s classic story “That Only a Mother.”

Without exception, the “upgrade” to the species is a mental power, usually telepathy. Clarke’s children move quickly beyond telepathy to telekinesis.¹⁰ Van Vogt’s Slan and Padgett’s Mutant feature two rival species of telepaths battling for dominance in the posthuman world while hiding from human pogroms. The Howard Families in Methuselah’s Children contains telepathic “sensitives” among their offspring, and when the reluctant hero from the “star line” in Beyond This Horizon finally marries his eugenically selected partner, they produce the telepathic child the Eugenics Board had been seeking. Sturgeon could be summing matters up for all his fellow authors when he writes: “The next important evolutionary step in man would be in a psychic rather than a physical direction” (109).¹¹

Telepathy turns out to be a means to another end in most of the works: merging individuals into a larger collective mind. Clarke is the most radical. He envisions a single Overmind of all the telepathic children on earth, possessed of such awesome powers that they eventually consume the planet itself and move out into space as a disembodied being (shades of the Arisians in E. E. Smith’s Lensmen series, 1934–1948). Sturgeon explores the concept of minds merging in more psychological terms. Sturgeon’s novel consists of three long parts, a central section, “Baby Is Three,” that was a Hugo award-winning story about the workings of trauma, repression, and memory recovery through psychoanalysis, and two flanking narratives, somewhat awkwardly constructed to give “Baby Is Three” a backstory and a conclusion. The climax of the book is the achievement of a fused multiple identity called Homo Gestalt (170). Heinlein, who loathes the idea of subordinating human individuality to a larger unit, has his long-lived Howard Families spurn an alien species’ offer to join them in “rapport groups” of ninety or more minds in return for enormous power (Franklin 42–43).

The fact that science still understood little about the actual mechanism of heredity did not dim SF’s enthusiasm for plots of species evolution. Until Oswald Avery’s work in the mid-1940s, it was not even clear that DNA was the part of the chromosome that mattered in inheritance.¹² The very confusions of the novels – such as their vision of evolutionary change as progressive – served the plot requirements of an action genre that had long relied on wars between alien species (the plot, complete with evolutionary themes, dates back to Wells’s The War of the Worlds [1898]). Genetics merely gave a new air of authenticity to an old storyline. Belief that survival of one species and the extinction of another vindicated the superiority of the winner had been a common confusion since Darwin’s day. Genetics allowed novelists to transpose the conflict inward. Rather than externalizing the struggle among species to interplanetary warfare, SF could bring the battle down to earth, as it were, shifting the strife to the personal realm and locating superiority in mental attributes.

The animus against genetic engineering would not survive the excitement surrounding Watson and Crick’s discovery of the structure of DNA. SF quickly adopted gene “modding” as the chosen method of creating a posthuman species. James Blish’s The Seedling Stars (1957), the last composed of this wave of SF about genetics, employs a more informed technical vocabulary and describes in detail the techniques of modifying the germ line to produce new species of humans – so-called “Adapted Men” – for extraterrestrial life on nonearthlike planets.¹³ Blish, who trained as a biologist at Rutgers and worked for Pfizer, may have been especially attuned to the significance of Watson and Crick’s breakthrough, but even Heinlein became interested in biomedical interventions that might change the species. In the only significant revision to the 1941 serial version of Methuselah’s Children prior to its first book publication in 1958, Heinlein alters his explanation of how normal humans discovered the secret of longevity, which the Howard Families had achieved via eugenics. In 1941, the secret lay in altering the “radioactive qualities” of certain vitamins (“Methuselah’s,” pt. 3, 161). In 1958, the secret has become biomedical, the transfusion of new blood produced in vitro from bone marrow (Methuselah’s 154–55).

What is it about this particular nexus of themes that attracted SF writers in the years 1940–1953? Why do fantasies of teleological evolution, species change, longevity, psychic powers, collective minds, the persecution of minorities, and the extinction of humanity come to be associated in work after work? How does this constellation of ideas reflect public knowledge of genetics at the time and what can such confused notions about genetics contribute to bioethical debates today?

One way to answer these questions is to approach science fiction as addressing larger cultural anxieties. Like the myths studied by Claude Lévi-Strauss, the books offer imaginary solutions to real social problems. The roles of telepathic communication and collective identity have sometimes been attributed to the interest of John W. Campbell in parapsychology (Luckhurst 410). This may be the case: Luckhurst quotes Campbell’s remark that he used Astounding Science Fiction to promote fiction about E.S.P. But the fantasy of mental communion with others responds to a wider cultural condition, the ambivalent attraction to authoritarian structures that Erich Fromm so memorably charted in his 1941 book Escape from Freedom. SF’s depiction of merged identity speaks to both the longing and the fear provoked by the spectacle of a world confronting totalitarian regimes, whether fascist or communist, which submerged the good of the individual to that of the group. Passionately idealistic, as much SF tended to be at the time, these works responded to the urge for communal identity but simultaneously paid homage to rebellion and nonconformity. Readers felt themselves part of a communal group but only because they were among the special few. The fusion of these contradictory impulses was a major part of the genre’s appeal. It was a haven for people who saw themselves as farsighted, misunderstood nonconformists persecuted by an uncomprehending majority, but who paradoxically banded together in tight-knit fan communities of fellow believers (Mendlesohn 10). Witness the subcultural phenomenon of “slan shacks,” group living arrangements for SF fans who used to refer to outsiders as “mundanes” (Coger). The constellation of ideas surrounding species change spurred generic innovation in the field of SF while serving as a vehicle for the contradictory affects of the post-WW II era.¹⁴

This incoherent affect was not unique to the world of SF but surfaced as a current in other sectors of society: beat poetry and jazz circles, popular films such as Rebel without a Cause (1955), mainstream bestsellers such as The Lonely Crowd (1950), The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit (1955), and The Organization Man (1956), and fiction favored by teenage nonconformists such as The Catcher in the Rye (1951) and Siddhartha (1922; U.S. publication, 1951). Such phenomena help us recognize SF’s vogue for telepathic union as what Jameson calls an “ideologeme,” a unit of narrative that “transmits a historical or a social message” (Archaeologies 322). Fantasies of a new species, born of the union of extraordinary individuals, played to idealism about a collective society but stripped the idea of its threat to the individual and of its political dimension. The same was true of the racial allegory that ran through many of these texts. Their repudiation of racial prejudice, frequently thematized in characters who marveled at bias based on something as “trivial” as skin color, catered to the fantasy of reconciling the races without political struggle.

The ideologeme of post-WW II SF about evolutionary change thus does not have the meanings commonly attributed to it in bioethics today. Neither does the genre’s short-lived antipathy to genetic engineering. Both responded to social and political concerns far removed from arguments about genetic enhancement in the twenty-first century. The temptation to use SF as a prop for advocacy for or against biotechnology fundamentally mistakes the cultural message of the genre around 1953. What the first wave of SF about genetics reveals, instead, is the importance of understanding scientific developments in their full social, political, and cultural contexts. The field of bioethics could benefit from literary approaches to science, but few of us engage with the issues that confront science policy today.

After Blish’s The Seedling Stars (1957), there was little SF about genetics for more than twenty years. A review of “Science Fiction and the Life Sciences” by Slonczewski and Levy suggests that a growing interest in environmentalism, which intensified after publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), stimulated SF writers to turn their attention to ecological issues, producing imaginative explorations of alien ecosystems such as Dune (1965) and The Left Hand of Darkness (1969). Another likely factor was the rise of the counterculture and new social movements concerned with minority and gender issues, which led to increased emphasis on fiction about altered states of consciousness and changed racial and sexual norms, especially in New Wave SF. In any event, almost no science fiction confronted questions of evolution and genetics in any depth until the excitement about recombinant DNA reignited interest in the mid-1970s.

Approaching the Millennium

The same themes of human species change, extrasensory communication, and collective modes of experience reappear, updated for a genomic age, in the SF published in the years leading up to the millennium. There are two crucial shifts of emphasis, however. First, because species change is brought about by deliberate genetic manipulation, there is less stress on a teleological conception of evolution. The ability to modify the genetic code means that alterations in the human form are chosen and are not the result of evolution, whether blind or directed. (Greg Bear’s novels are an important exception, as we shall see). These books have fully assimilated the notion that “With our biological research we are taking control of evolution and beginning to direct it,” to quote one of the bioethicists from the beginning of this chapter (Stock 17). Second, diversity of form within the species is prominent. An obvious thematization of multicultural racial diversity, the plea for biologically diverse beings to find areas of commonality is framed as the only hope for descendants of humanity in a hostile universe. Transformation and species diversity are seen as survival characteristics; continuous adaptation and flexibility about the boundaries of the acceptable are primary values.

Both of these developments – acceptance of artificial reproduction and respect for diversity – are signs of how the subculture of SF had joined other new social movements such as feminism, queer and transsexual politics, disability rights, and multiculturalism to stake out a distinctive, countercultural position in opposition to prevailing trends in the Nixon–Reagan years. Although many women active in feminist causes reacted against invasive biomedical technology in matters of reproduction, SF emphasized the thematics of reproductive choice to align its positive attitude toward genetic engineering with women’s rights. Octavia Butler’s more complicated portrayal – the Xenogenesis trilogy supports genetic manipulation of the species but does not hide this intervention’s kinship with other kinds of violence against women – stands out in contrast to some of the other SF of the period. In the 1990s, transgender, transsexual, and prosthetic choices grew in prominence, particularly in cyberpunk fiction, though this theme had influential precursors in the fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin and Joanna Russ. The advocacy for diversity within the species was less conflicted. If the racial politics of the first wave of posthuman SF was predominantly liberal (or sometimes libertarian) in its advocacy of equal rights and tolerance, the sexual and racial politics of the second wave reveals its affinities with the new left in its embrace of hybridity.

Both the continuity and the difference between the two phases can be brought out by comparing the last of the fifties SF in this vein, James Blish’s The Seedling Stars (1957), with an early example of the later phase, John Varley’s The Ophiuchi Hotline (1977). Blish’s Adapted Men did not evolve through natural selection but were engineered in the laboratory for survival in alien environments. Outlawed and hunted on Earth, they become the pioneers of humanity’s expansion into space. Foreshadowing later SF motifs, they prosper in all their myriad forms, growing into the majority and leaving the “basic human type” (Blish 156) behind. The moral could not be stated more plainly: “It’s only sensible to go on evolving with the universe” (151).

Varley’s novel opens with criminal charges alleging that the heroine “did willfully and knowingly conduct experiments upon human genetic material … [and] produce human blastocysts and embryos reflecting potential structures atypical of the permitted spectrum of Humanity” (Ophiuchi 1). This felony is one of the few offences punishable by death and the total eradication of all copies of the criminal’s genotype, preventing future cloning of the miscreant. The ban on radical genetic experiments had been meant to be only a moratorium, but it had hardened into a prohibition that lasted for 500 years. (This detail alludes to the voluntary moratorium on recombinant DNA research that led up to the historic Asilomar Conference of 1975, a gathering of scientists and ethicists that developed guidelines for how to pursue further research in the area safely.) As any veteran SF reader would anticipate, the rebel against the novel’s genetics laws turns out to be one of the saviors of humanity, which was dooming itself in its struggle against alien invaders by clinging to human racial purity. The moral in this case is as plain as in Blish’s earlier novel: “You will have to cease defining your race by something as arbitrary as a genetic code, and make the great leap to establishing a racial awareness that will hold together in spite of the physical differences you will be introducing among yourselves” (Varley 159).

The renewed surge of interest in genetics picked up speed in the second half of the 1980s with the publication of influential fiction by Bruce Sterling (Schismatrix [1985] and five related stories) and Octavia E. Butler (Xenogenesis trilogy, 1986–1988). Sterling, one of the cofounders of the cyberpunk movement, and Butler, a noted African American feminist writer, stretched the boundary of the genre in several ways. Sterling’s future interplanetary society, nicknamed the Schismatrix, is divided between posthumans who have used cyborg implants to transcend the human body and others who have used genetics to the same end. Warring with one another, the two camps (and other splinter factions) live in the shadow of alien Investors, possessing vastly superior technology that they use to promote their interstellar trading empire. Bruce Clarke reproaches Sterling for retailing “an all-too-human oppositionalism” in the war between the two camps (160), reflecting the tendency of literary theorists of posthumanism to evaluate SF according to how staunchly it resists the tendency to fall back into humanism (Milburn levels similar charges against Blish’s “Surface Tension,” 96–106). But Sterling’s solution to the dilemma of unifying the species after it has splintered apart into incommensurate posthuman forms rejects this “oppositionalism” and adopts instead a posthuman philosophy developed by the (real-life) complexity theorist, Ilya Prigogine (1917–2003). Prigogine’s version of complexity offers the characters in the fractured world of the Schismatrix a model of self-organizing structures, which become intelligible only from the perspective of a higher level of organization. “By the term we, I don’t mean … humanity,” one character remarks (Sterling, “Cicada” 273). We can be applied to any group of beings that has organized itself on a sufficient level of complexity, regardless of their external form. “It’s time we learned to stop looking for solid ground to stand on…. Posthumanism offers fluidity and freedom” (“Cicada” 274).

Butler’s Xenogenesis series adopts the motif of interstellar Traders too (a familiar topos in SF, not a borrowing from Sterling). The Oankali travel the galaxy in search of interesting genomes with which to merge their own. “We trade the essence of ourselves. Our genetic material for yours,” one of the Traders explains. “We do what you would call genetic engineering…. It renews us, enables us to survive as an evolving species instead of specializing ourselves into extinction or stagnation” (Dawn 39). They create new, hybrid species, a mixing that captures the spirit of postmodern theories of deterritorialization, fluid economies, and hybridity, as Gabriele Schwab and many others have pointed out (Schwab 215).¹⁵ The unfortunate consequence, from the humans’ perspective, is that humanity disappears as a species, merging into the new Oankali/human hybrid. (Echoing the resolution of other SF works in this vein, a tiny remnant of old humanity is given the option of going its own way by being transported to Mars.) Butler’s novels embrace this prospect for humanity, welcoming a posthuman future as the only possible mode of survival for a species that has already destroyed the planet through nuclear warfare and is on the verge of extinction. Humanity is doomed because of its deadly combination of intelligence and the instinct for hierarchy.

By now, it should be apparent that acceptance, even advocacy, of a posthuman future is the norm, not the exception, in SF. We have seen it throughout the first and second periods of interest in this topic – perhaps most memorably enshrined by the conclusion of Clarke’s Childhood’s End, when humanity’s child, the Overmind, consumes all the substance of Earth and sets out for the stars.¹⁶ At the end of the third volume in Butler’s series, the hybrid descendants of what used to be the Oankali and human species accept a similar fate for Earth – they will consume the planet for fuel, leaving behind a cold, lifeless husk when they depart for the stars. What is distinctive about Butler’s handling of this plot is how nakedly she depicts the violence of these conflicts, the racial hatred, the fear of difference, the brutality of strong against weak, the ineradicable stain of sexual violence, the hierarchical impulse that condemns the old species, our species, to extinction.

The great anomaly among the second phase of SF novels about genetics is Greg Bear’s two-part series, Darwin’s Radio (1999) and Darwin’s Children (2003). Although the novels incorporate all three of the main thematic concerns – sudden species change, extrasensory communication, and group consciousness – and feature plots involving persecution of the posthuman minority by humanity, they differ from their contemporary peers by attributing species change not to genetic engineering but to evolution and by reasserting the directed nature of speciation. Bear updates the evolutionary paradigm by recourse to cutting-edge but sometimes controversial research; the result is an effective appearance of a scientific rationale for directed evolution. In an afterword, Bear forthrightly admits that “it is very likely that many of the speculations here will turn out to be wrong” (Darwin’s Radio 527), but the speculations stem from extrapolations from current research.

Bear’s novel was billed as a crossover work, a techno-thriller in the mode of contagion narratives such as Michael Creighton’s The Andromeda Strain (1969) or Robin Cook’s Outbreak (1989) rather than a work of science fiction, but the SF community was not about to let such an accomplished work go unclaimed and gave it the Nebula Award for 2000.¹⁷ Scientific thrillers give authors more latitude for expository conversations among researchers and government bureaucrats than SF because the technical information itself is seen as a source of the genre’s appeal, and both of Bear’s novels end with glossaries of scientific terms. Thriller conventions differ as well from mainline SF in featuring capsule character sketches whenever a new actor comes on the scene; gratuitous sex scenes; point of view shifts to facilitate speed of narration; and quick cuts between exotic locales, each labeled with a place heading (the Alps, Tbilisi, New York, NIH headquarters, the CDC, an archaeology dig in Washington state). I bring up the presence of these thriller conventions in Bear’s series not only as an aesthetic issue but to underline the point that this fictional genre – like SF with its reliance on different narrative formulas – is immediately recognizable as fiction despite its parade of scientific information.

The truth is, scientific thrillers and SF are better suited to this kind of thought experiment than most of the nonfiction about posthumanism that aims to influence public policy. The formal conventions of fiction alert readers to the provisional nature of analogy and extrapolation. As many critics have pointed out, SF does not pretend to predict the future or give prophecies of things to come. By contrast, nonfiction anticipations of the posthuman do exactly that: they specialize in prophesies and predictions. This difference is part of what is at stake in emphasizing SF’s fictionality. Coleridge famously wrote that literature required a “willing suspension of disbelief,” but the act of willing oneself to enter an imaginary world affords a safeguard against taking possible futures as inevitable (or even probable in any testable way). Fiction does not have to pass a test of verifiability; it has its own procedures for establishing what counts as plausible, and one rarely mistakes those procedures for truth claims. Ironically, nonfiction about the posthuman is more susceptible to the ridicule of time than works of SF.

In the next section, I turn to nonfiction prophecies of the coming posthuman age. The purpose of this juxtaposition is both to demonstrate their kinship to SF and to note the poor use they make of SF’s formidable powers of world building. The truth is that these nonfiction texts fail to employ the narrative resources literature has at its disposal. Their future scenarios are thinly imagined. They lack the narrative coherence, the careful development of motifs, and the richly textured world building that gives plausibility – even integrity – to good fiction. Yet these nonfiction texts rely utterly on the expectations that readers bring to their future scenarios from SF. The grounds of comparison lie in the rhetorical dependence of this body of nonfiction on modes of reality testing and future thinking developed by science fiction.

Jeremiads and Anticipations

In a celebrated work of American studies, Sacvan Bercovitch coined the phrase “American jeremiad” to describe an eighteenth-century genre of political sermon that set the tone for much brooding upon the destiny of our nation for the next two centuries. The New England Puritans intended their mode of public exhortation “to join social criticism to spiritual renewal, public to private identity, the shifting ‘signs of the times’ to certain traditional metaphors, themes, and symbols” (Bercovitch xi). The result was to construct a “myth of America” and “clothe history as fiction,” but the myth succeeded “in proportion to its capacity to help people act in history. Ultimately, its effectiveness derive[d] from its functional relationship to facts” (Bercovitch xi).

Bercovitch’s account of the American jeremiad indicates what I mean by calling the writings on posthumanism by Leon Kass, Michael Sandel, and Francis Fukuyama “jeremiads.” The rhetoric is fierce enough to qualify. Kass compares “posthuman Brave New Worlders” to “inhuman Osama bin Ladens” and maintains that genetic engineering fosters a “soft dehumanization” as pernicious as “the cruel dehumanization of Nazi and Soviet tyranny” (Life 4, 7); Sandel talks of “designing parents,” of “hubris,” and of “the one-sided triumph of willfulness” (Sandel 46, 85); Fukuyama chooses “Transhumanism” as his contribution to a series on “The World’s Most Dangerous Ideas.” But it is not merely fierce rhetoric that revives the spirit of the Old Testament prophet; it is the ambition to spur spiritual renewal through social criticism and to counter shifting signs of the time – genetic enhancement, longevity research – by recourse to traditional metaphors, themes, and symbols.

The new wrinkle that scientific jeremiads bring to the genre is their covert relationship to SF. The works’ ability to spur people to act in history depends on inducing readers to frame and test experiences as if they were aspects of science fiction (Csicsery-Ronay). Their effectiveness depends on a certain functional relationship to facts, as Bercovitch said of the Puritan sermon. That functionality relies on readers who are accustomed to taking fantastic futures seriously. The power to mobilize citizens comes from the ease with which readers have learned to extrapolate from facts that could entail an imagined future. Of course, the same facts could entail a radically different future or be largely irrelevant to what eventually occurs. But the call to action in scientific jeremiads elides such possibilities.

There is an important place in bioethics for thinking about the consequences of new technologies, of course. But researchers in the field expect predictions about the social implications of scientific developments to be grounded in evidence and to employ testable methods such as economic modeling, surveys of attitudes and trends, studies of how technologies are used by different populations, or historical analyses of medicine and science. Research-based attempts to forecast future trends are often framed in a distinctive vocabulary: they are termed projections, and their predictive character is subject to disconfirmation by new data.¹⁸ By contrast, scientific jeremiads rarely restrict themselves to the evidence base or to projecting trends. They are the “scare-mongering” pole (Carter, Bartlett, and Hall) of what has variously been called “anticipatory” or “speculative bioethics” (King, Whitaker, and Jones; Brey; Racine et al.; Schick). Instead of using forecasting methodology, they rely on blurring the genre between research-based projections and scientific fictionality.

One sees the power of scientific extrapolations when one comes up against communities in our nation who do not give them credence. Think of how bewildering it strikes most Americans when climate change skeptics deny the long-term forecasts of environmental science or fundamentalists espouse an eschatological vision involving imminent Rapture. Trust in a scientific vision of the future, though, has never depended on one’s ability to assess the science itself, something beyond the reach of most people. Rather, it comes from the “willing suspension of disbelief” in extrapolation, a suspension Coleridge saw as crucial to our response to fictive, not factual, writings. Climate skeptics treat scientific projections as if they were fictions they can choose to “believe” or not. Authors of scientific jeremiads treat fictions as if they were scientific projections.

For jeremiads about genetics, perhaps the chief rhetorical tactic is to counter the science fictional metaphors of posthumanism with rival metaphors derived not from the future but from the past, metaphors chiefly concerning human nature, natural rights, and human dignity. As philosophers and political theorists, these writers give accounts of their central terms as concepts, not metaphors, and the extensive debate about their work has largely taken them at their word, investigating conceptual flaws in their arguments.¹⁹ But the rhetorical power of these terms functions independently from their logical coherence.

The rhetorical tropes in the works are legion: hyperbole, personification, analogy, guilt by association, symbolic opposition, performative speech acts, leading questions, organic metaphors, and more. But all writing is figurative, and identifying such tropes will hardly surprise readers. It is not the constitutive role of figurative language in the jeremiads that matters, but the functional motivation of these tropes. Scientific jeremiads attempt to motivate people to act in history – to resist a feared future – by conjuring a “novum,” to use Darko Suvin’s term for the novel reality SF creates. These jeremiads warn against an “alternate reality logically necessitated by and proceeding from” a fiction (Suvin 75). This totalizing rhetorical strategy, as effective in nonfiction as in science fiction, can only be tested by recourse to the sensibilities that one uses to judge SF. Is the novum believable? The jeremiad, however, has designs on the reader – it calls on one to accept a SF novum as a reason to act in history.²⁰

The rhetorical strategies these jeremiads about genetics use to create a novum can be reduced to three basic forms: (1) performative speech, (2) symbolic oppositions, and (3) metaphors of organicism. Sandel is the great practitioner of performative rhetoric. Again and again, dozens of times in his very short book, The Case against Perfection, Sandel states that “we” are made uneasy by some aspect of genetic enhancement, asserting in a performative speech act what he ought to be proving. The basic rhetorical move goes like this: “And yet something about the ad leaves a lingering moral qualm” (3); “And yet there is something unsettling about the prospect of genetically altered athletes” (8); “There is something unsettling about the specter of genetically altered athletes lifting SUVs or hitting 650-foot home runs or running a three-minute mile” (12). He never makes any effort to document that people are made uneasy by such phenomena. Some people may be, although it is clear from the clamoring voices in favor of enhancement that many are not. Hence, it is incumbent on Sandel to demonstrate rather than just assert that “we” are queasy. Instead, he immediately follows up these assertions with leading questions: “But what exactly is troubling about these scenarios?” (12); “Is the scenario troubling because the unenhanced poor are denied the benefits of bioengineering, or because the enhanced affluent are somehow dehumanized?” (15–16). Any possible answer grants his premise.

Kass deploys symbolic oppositions pitting “us” against “them” with similar fluency. One of his favorite moves is to sort those who agree with him into a valorized group and those who disagree into people “who can’t see or don’t care about what lies ahead” (Life 10). The latter is made up of “scientists and biotechnologists, their entrepreneurial backers and a cheering claque of sci-fi enthusiasts, futurologists and libertarians” (Life 6). His side, by contrast, “sees all too clearly where the train is headed”; his side “can distinguish cleverness about means from wisdom about ends, and we are loath to entrust the future of the race to those who cannot tell the difference” (Life 6). If one differs from Kass, then one is either blind or uncaring, and in any event, cannot tell the difference between means and ends. The passage concludes with a ringing tautology: “No friend of humanity cheers for a posthuman future” (Life 6).

Kass’s oppositional rhetoric is apiece with the underlying time structure of scientific jeremiads. His temporal model conforms to the paradigm that Catherine Gallagher has described as a “Y-shaped pattern” (16) where a single time track splits into two. Gallagher’s subject is alternative history narratives, so her article is concerned with plots that “undo” some event in the past to demonstrate what the present might be like if a critical event or choice had gone another way. This same Y-shaped model of time is implicit in scientific jeremiads but to less salutary ends. Whereas the plot of undoing aims to highlight or (in the political arena, remediate) historical injustices, a similar logic when applied to the future reduces a plurality of possible outcomes to two stark alternatives.²¹ Science fictions about time travel have sometimes engaged in a similar reduction of temporal alternatives, particularly those that involve the so-called grandmother paradox in which the protagonist travels back in time and accidentally marries a grandparent. But more commonly, SF stories about time travel, parallel worlds, and multiverses have opened onto an infinity of possible universes – think of classics like Fritz Leiber’s The Big Time (1958) or more recent stories like Greg Egan’s “The Infinite Assassin” (1991), not to mention nongenre works such as Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths” (1941). Kass’s model of the future, by contrast, depends on the same either/or choice that is echoed in his us-against-them rhetoric.

What Bercovitch says about the Puritan jeremiad applies as forcefully to Kass’s book: “The rhetoric plainly substitutes symbolic for social analysis” (Bercovitch 177). Here’s how Bercovitch explains the problem with this procedure:

It is hard to think of a better example of how symbolic analysis confines a person to alternatives generated by the symbol itself than a line such as this one in Kass: “Because to say ‘yes’ to baby manufacture is to say ‘no’ to all natural human relations” (Life 19). All natural human relations?

Fukuyama’s Our Posthuman Future is the most temperate, thoughtful, and persuasive book of the three, but it is a jeremiad all the same. The core of the book is a carefully argued set of chapters defining and defending what Kass and Sandel leave vague, the concept of human nature. His arguments draw on evolutionary biology and psychology to provide a ground for speaking of human nature without resorting to religious assumptions. I will not debate whether these arguments hold up but will only focus on the rhetorical moments where his quasi-biological defense of the concept of “human nature” slides into generalizations about what it is “natural” to desire, think, and do – moments, that is, where statements about human nature become motives for action.

Students of romanticism have long been aware of what Paul de Man termed the “intentional structure” of the organicist metaphor, which underwrote much literature and philosophy of the period. The characteristic effect of this metaphor was to import a temporal dimension into a substantive quality, giving to a concept such as “nature” the appearance of entailing (“intending”) particular ideas, feelings, or modes of being. Something is “natural” because it appears to originate in nature, not because it differs from the artificial or the unnatural. Clearly, if one thinks about it for a minute, one realizes that artificial things trace their origins back to nature. Everything originates in nature, even society (if a religious origin is discounted, as it is by Fukuyama). This is as true of cloning as it is of queer sexuality or anything else that a conservative commentator might want to condemn as “unnatural.” You cannot call something “natural” merely because it originates in our shared biological nature – you must find some other way to define the unnatural if that is your agenda.

When Fukuyama claims to have proven that human nature “serves to provide us with guidance as to what political orders won’t work” (Our Posthuman Future 127) because they are not “natural,” we see the organicist metaphor structuring his thought. The “failure of communism” occurred because of the “failure to respect the natural inclination to favor kin and private property” (127). When he says, “Human beings have been wired by evolution to be social creatures” (124), he makes a statement about what human nature is, based on claims put forward by evolutionary psychology. When he moves on to say that humans have “natural tendencies” and “natural human desires” (126–27), he makes a different kind of statement about where certain tendencies and desires originate. The intentional structure of the metaphor of organic growth lends the latter statement its only power.

Let me turn to the other side, the proenhancement books that have glutted the market. The same rhetorical elements can be found in these texts too. The group of anticipations concerning developments in genetics are, if anything, more dependent than the jeremiads on the habits and sensibilities cultivated by SF. The language of their titles is rich with tropes that evoke a novum: genetics will enable us to redesign our species, enhance the human, make better people, upgrade the brain, reach our inevitable genetic future, assist in radical evolution, and design our babies.²² The three strategies of performative speech, symbolic oppositions, and organicist metaphors are deployed just as prominently.

The rhetoric of proenhancement anticipations warrants somewhat less detailed treatment since it lacks the call to action characteristic of jeremiads and dystopias. That is, encomia to genetic engineering generally lack a compelling demand to act in history. Rather, they seemed designed to wow the reader with the present than to shape the future. In the crassest cases, the intent seems to be to make money off of the author’s own science by publishing a trade book. The impulse may be venal, but it is relatively harmless.

On the surface, the kinship of the genre of anticipations with SF would appear to be greater than that of jeremiads, but both nonfiction genres are the siblings, as I said earlier, of the SF they scorn. An unmistakable sign of their affiliation lies in their continual invocation of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Whereas Kass and Fukuyama devote substantial parts of their opening chapters to discussing Huxley’s dystopia as a warning about our future, Stock, Garreau, and Green all invoke Huxley’s vision to distinguish it from what they claim are more probable futures. The continuity they assume between a renowned fictional future and their own nonfiction scenarios makes the point. Science fictional habits of mind are implicit preconditions of all these texts. If Huxley’s looming shadow is not enough, there is another piece of SF that is invoked several times, although none of the authors make clear that they are quoting a fiction. Lee Silver frames his anticipation of genetics, Remaking Eden: How Genetic Engineering and Cloning Will Transform the American Family (1998), with an amusing fiction in the form of a commission report in the year 2350, detailing worries about the GenRich and the Naturals diverging to form two incompatible species. Silver cribs the idea of an imaginary future lecturer from J. B. S. Haldane’s “Daedalus, or, Science and the Future” (1923), and Silver’s imaginings are every bit as speculative. Fukuyama, however, references this future vision without letting on that it is a fiction. Ronald Green, at least, follows his discussion of Silver’s “troubling prediction” (Green 135) by a discussion of H. G. Wells’s vision of the Morlocks and Eloi in The Time Machine. But Green never directly states that Silver’s worry is a fantasy, not a prediction. Such slippage illustrates the kinship these works bear to our culture’s science fiction.

Like jeremiads, positive anticipations of our genetic future aspire to be prophetic, but theirs is a more prosaic form of prophecy, one that cannot trace its lineage from the warnings of Biblical seers and Puritan preachers. Anticipations traffic in scientific razzle dazzle, and their attempts to inspire awe at biotechnology’s wonders sometimes result merely in the feeling of gee whiz. Their predictions risk being disproven by the next twist or turn of history; the best they can aim for is the hit-or-miss success rate typical of Wells’s prognostications in Anticipations (1901), and he was unusually successful. Both jeremiads and encomia are vulnerable to disconfirmation, but the latter especially court the ridicule of time. They are the dreamers who risk waking to laughter. Disconfirmation of a jeremiad grants a feeling of relief. There but by the grace of God, we sigh.

The few worrisome problems that encomia present differ in kind from jeremiads too. They are more immediate and tend to call for practical solutions. Several commentators are concerned that unduly optimistic expectations can raise false hopes in patients or result in disillusionment when technologies do not fulfill these promises in a timely fashion. As a result, “an emerging technology can be smothered or hampered … by the weight of enthusiastic speculative expectations (such as has arguably been the case for genomic medicine)” (King et al. 147). Others have argued that the debate about hypothetical outcomes of technologies still on the horizon “bypasses the present as a site of moral agency,” diverting attention away from more urgent current concerns (Schick 226).

Perhaps the most troubling issue with scientific anticipations is that they often fall prey to a temptation embedded in the very structure of genome time. That temptation is the millenarian impulse, the dream of sudden, radical transformation of the human. We saw it on display in the rhetoric of the “new immortals,” “fast-forwarding evolution,” and taking “the next step up” listed in the quotations at the beginning of this chapter. This dream has given rise to the discourse of transhumanism and talk of the coming singularity. It lies behind the belief that we are “the last humans,” now “poised to transcend our current form” (Stock 1). Millenarian thinking is teleological and proceeds in stages with pronounced emphasis on beginnings and ends. John Harris is not shy about proclaiming the teleological goal of “making better people.” He writes: “I propose both the wisdom and the necessity of intervening … to improve things by taking control of evolution and our future development to the point, and indeed beyond the point, where we humans will have changed, perhaps into a new and certainly into a better species altogether” (4–5). For many, the magnitude of this change can only be grasped by invoking the dawn and the end of life as we know it. Like Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stock imagines two cataclysmic stages of transformation on our planet:

Shades of Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End! Science fiction has given us richer, more fully imagined visions of such change, but there is a difference between fiction and scientific anticipations, or there should be. That difference is one of genre, and understanding the power of genre to shape our response to genome time speaks directly to the value of literary studies for bioethics and public policy. Literature makes it hard to forget the human component that is the reverse side of genome time: not only the incomprehensible eons Stock evokes, but also the arc of individual lives; not only the birth of multicellular organisms, but also the legacy of our recent historical past, the quotidian circumstances of the present, and the near-term prospect of what lies ahead. In literature, we encounter the full resonance of genome time – both the millenarian or dystopian transformations to come and the incalculably precious lives lived one moment at a time.