Nature, it seems, is the popular name
For milliards and milliards and milliards
Of particles playing their infinite game
Of billiards and billiards and billiards.
Piet Hein
Sci-fi, ever since 'Frankenstein', has been haunted by genes
Nature, it seems, is the popular name
For milliards and milliards and milliards
Of particles playing their infinite game
Of billiards and billiards and billiards.
Piet Hein
British author Aldous Huxley, as early as 1932, wrote the haunting novel Brave New World. Set in AF 632-that is, 632 years after the advent of car magnate Henry Ford-the novel foresees a New World Order: a World State whose stability is maintained through biological engineering. Its two billion citizens have not been born but hatched to fulfil predestined social roles. They are no more than cells in the body politic. The virtues of obedience, lust for consumption and mechanical promiscuity are inculcated through hypnopaedia (sleep-teaching). Every aspect of life has been reduced to the level of social utility. Even corpses are seen as a source of phosphorus. The World State is divided into 10 zones, each run by a Resident World Controller. In this hierarchical factory-like concern, citizens are divided into categories ranging from Epsilon-Minus-semi-morons bred for menial labour-and Alpha-Plus intellectuals. Others occupy the vast gray zones between these two categories, depending on their utility value. What permits insurrection in this tightly controlled World State is the existence of various neatly segregated Savage Reservations. The savages, who live behind electric fences, still get marrid, make love, give birth, have many names and die as of old.
What does Huxley's dismal view have to do with the cracking of the DNA code? Four novels in the first half of 20th century dealt with the idea that science is going to create dystopia or rather its world would be anti-Utopia. Zamayatin's We (1920); Huxley's Brave New World (1932); Koestler's Darkness at Noon (1940); and Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Kingsley Amis' New Maps of Hell (1960), the earliest history of Science Fiction, records nearly 70 short stories which anticipated the genetic revolution. H.G. Wells in 1923 wrote probably the only Utopian novel on genetic engineering-Men Like God. The ongoing debate on the ethics versus utility of the genome project seems to be a replica of two literary worlds: the world of Wells and the world of Huxley. But the gravity of the latest discovery was in more than one way foretold even in popular fiction. For instance, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. It must be remembered that Frankenstein is a scientist and not a magician. In the bizarre proceeding of stitching parts of human bodies and galvanise the result into life, no supernatural force is used and it's well within the parameters of the modern lab. Will the future be a Gothic horror?