JAG: I seldom remember where ideas come from. I wrote the basics of Commitment Hour as a novella many years before I decided to turn it into a book; wherever the original seed came from, I can’t remember. Frankly, it’s just cool to imagine the opportunity to experience life as both male and female; it’s also dramatic to force a character to choose which one (s)he’ll be permanently.
However, there’s a temptation to think that a personal familiarity with both genders would somehow “fix” one’s sexual problems. I didn’t want to say that at all. Characters in Commitment Hour still have plenty of difficulties with relationships, which is my way of saying that difficulties arise because you’re different people, not because you’re different genders. In fact, the residents of Tober Cove are just as gender-biased as anyone else. People are required to fit into restricted sex roles, which is justified by saying, “You freely chose to be female, so now you can only do female things.” Only outsiders like Rashid, Steck, and Zephram are prepared to allow for looser restrictions. They aren’t so quick to attribute all differences to mere gender.
LBR: That’s true. In some ways, the residents of Tober Cove are more restrictive. Maybe it was just my interpretation, but I understood it that while you were one gender, while you had memory of being the other, you weren’t linked to the other gender’s mindset, and that caused some of the bias. Only those like Steck really had an understanding of both, because they were both.
JAG: Yes, that’s more or less it. Your experiences as one gender were more immediate than your experiences as the opposite gender. For Neuts like Steck, both genders had the same weight (for reasons explained in the book’s climax).
LBR: In Hunted, you touch on an issue that is a heated topic of discussion in the world of science today—genetic engineering. In your books, tampering with genetics has been outlawed, and the lead character and his sibling are found out to have been genetically engineered. The lead character, Edward, is considered mentally challenged—and his sister, while genetically perfect, isn’t necessarily playing with a full deck, either, as we come to discover in the story. I thought this was an interesting aspect—it seems that no matter what the physical results of genetic manipulation may be, there’s a price to be paid mentally/psychologically. Was this your intent, or just something that came about as the story progressed?
JAG: In large part, this was just something I was forced into because of what I consider scientific inevitability. I’m writing about an age four hundred years in the future. If scientific development continues unabated—and of course, that’s a big if, since there are lots of things that could cause civilization to collapse or stagnate—but if development continues, it’s hard to imagine that Homo sapiens will exist as we know it four centuries from now.
Humanity isn’t going to be destroyed; it’s going to be replaced incrementally by offspring who have been engineered to be different from their parents. Some of it will come from gene-tinkering, and some will come from various kinds of mechanical augmentation. There’ll still be a few pure human hold-outs, but they’ll be curiosities like the Amish. I truly believe the majority of our descendants will be qualitatively non-human. There will certainly be attempts to outlaw human modification, but in the long term, they won’t succeed.
On the other hand, I wanted to write about recognizably human people in the year 2452. So what could I do? How could I reconcile the likelihood of radical change with my desire to write about good old Homo sapiens?
My solution was to say that juggling the human genome was simply more difficult than anyone ever imagined. It’s still possible—remember, I like universes with infinite possibility—but in the League of Peoples stories, genetic experimentation is so difficult, and so likely to lead to disastrous results, that most governments have banned it. This is why Festina et al. are still perfectly human.
I might point out that the same limitation doesn’t apply to the aliens that I called the Divians. Their genome is easier to engineer, which is why they’ve created a number of subspecies that appear in various books.
LBR: Tell us about your new novel, Ascending.
JAG: Ascending is the story of Oar, who first appeared in Expendable. Oar is a member of an artificial humanoid race who never age and can withstand many dangers that would kill terrestrial human beings. However, her species has a terrible flaw: around age 50, their brains become “tired,” leading to a sort of bored senility. They just lose interest in the world. To me, this is as frightening as actual death; and the prospect is equally frightening to Oar, who’s 49 years old and on the verge of succumbing to her racial curse. The action centers around her deteriorating thought processes and her attempts to save herself from her fate.
The book also features Festina Ramos, who shows up in time to help Oar face a number of threats. In the course of events, Festina learns what really happened four hundred years earlier when the “League of Peoples” showed up to uplift the human race. I don’t want to give too much away, but the situation isn’t nearly as simple (or as benign) as previously believed.
This, by the way, is one of the lovely aspects of writing in the first person. I mentioned earlier that all my narrators are unreliable. In every one of my books, the narrators tell outright lies. Sometimes it’s obvious from context that they’re lying; sometimes it’s not. Sometimes the lies are deliberate; sometimes they’re telling what they believe is the truth, but not what I (the omniscient author) know is actually going on. It’s fun to play such games.
LBR: Damn, that leaves me with all sorts of questions, but I don’t want to pry for spoilers. So just one—you say Oar is an artificial humanoid. Is it safe to ask whether or not who created Oar’s race will be addressed in the book?
JAG: Yes, that question will be answered.
LBR: We’ve lost a healthy number of venerable science fiction and fantasy authors in the past couple of years, such as Poul Anderson, Douglas Adams, Gordon Dickson, L. Sprague de Camp, and A.E. van Vogt, among others. Some of these talents have been the visionaries of SF from its beginnings. Now that these talents have passed on, what or who do you see on the horizon as those who will envision the future for the next generation of SF readers?
JAG: Everyone who’s writing science fiction today, plus everyone who comes along in our footsteps. Science fiction is a gestalt: it’s Ursula K. LeGuin to Buck Rogers, Star Trek to Gene Wolfe, rockets and ray-guns to the deepest reflections on existence. Why kick anyone out of the party? Even the worst schlock might inspire some twelve-year-old to magnificence.
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Louis Bright-Raven has been a writer/illustrator/editor in the comic book and SF industry since 1994. He lives in Nevada. He invites you to check out his Web site, Constellation Studios, for more information about him, his work, and the work of other talents.
To Make a New Dog
By Dan Derby
1/14/01
Eduardo Kac is building “GFP K-9,” a glow-in-the-dark dog. He expects it to have a “literally colorful personality.” Don’t laugh; in 2000, Kac built a glow-in-the-dark rabbit, Alba, in Jouy-en-Josas, France. Working with a French biotech firm, he created the rabbit by imbedding green fluorescent protein (a bioluminescent substance from a Pacific Northwest jellyfish) in the DNA of an albino rabbit. Kac is a Ph.D. research fellow at the Centre for Advanced Inquiry in Interactive Arts (CAiiA) at the University of Wales and an Associate Professor of Art and Technology at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has sent shudders through both animal lovers and bioengineers alike. Asking why he did this is probably asking the wrong question. Kac, it turns out, is only using current technology to do something that mankind has been at for at least two thousand years, if not a hundred thousand. He’s using biological beings as a means of self-expression. Let’s go back a while to examine this historical phenomena.
Domestication and the Dog
Dogs came to us in prehistory as small, shy scavengers. This was well before domestication of the “big five” herbivores—cattle, horses, pigs, sheep, and goats, and long before agriculture. With the possible exception of the horse, our relationship with dogs is unique. They have been true working partners, not food stocks. Even horses started as food stock before becoming our first high-speed transit system. This canine partnership, combined with the unique characteristics of the dog, probably explains our profound feelings toward them.
The business of these very early dogs was scavenging, bringing them only partially into our camps. However, mankind has never been able to leave well enough alone. Early on we started simple culling for traits we recognized as useful. As man had early successes and built specialized canine functions, the non-random selective breeding we use today evolved. Interestingly, much of the evidence has suggested that this was going on around the time of our shift from hunter-gatherer to agricultural producers.