In Other Worlds Part 4

By the time we find John Mortimer's Rumpole of the Bailey referring to his dumpy, kitchen-cleanser-conscious wife as "she who must be obeyed," the once-potent figure has been secularized and demythologized, and has dwindled into the combination of joke and rag doll that it may have been in its origins. Nevertheless, we must not forget one of Ayesha's pre-eminent powers-the ability to reincarnate herself. Like the vampire dust at the end of Christopher Lee movies, blowing away only to rea.s.semble itself at the outset of the next film, She could come back. And back. And back.

No doubt this is because She is in some ways a permanent feature of the human imagination. She's one of the giants of the nursery, a threatening but compelling figure, bigger and better than life. Also worse, of course. And therein lies her attraction.

NOTES.

1. Margaret Atwood, "Superwoman Drawn and Quartered: The Early Forms of She," Alphabet magazine, vol. 10, July 1965.

2. Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge, Ma.s.s.: Harvard University Press, 1976).

3. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, vol. 2, s.e.xchanges (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).

4. Daniel Karlin, Introduction, in H. Rider Haggard, She (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).

H. Rider Haggard:.

The Queen of Quinkdom:.

The Birthday of the World.

and Other Stories.

by Ursula K. Le Guin.

The Birthday of the World is Ursula K. Le Guin's tenth collection of stories. In it she demonstrates once again why she is the reigning queen of ... but immediately we come to a difficulty, for what is the fitting name of her kingdom? Or, in view of her abiding concern with the ambiguities of gender, her queendom, or perhaps-considering how she likes to mix and match-her quinkdom? Or may she more properly be said to have not one such realm, but two?

"Science fiction" is the box in which her work is usually placed, but it's an awkward box: it bulges with discards from elsewhere. Into it have been crammed all those stories that don't fit comfortably into the family room of the socially realistic novel or the more formal parlour of historical fiction, or other compartmentalized genres: westerns, gothics, horrors, gothic romances, and the novels of war, crime, and spies. Its subdivisions include science fiction proper (gizmo-riddled and theory-based s.p.a.ce travel, time travel, or cybertravel to other worlds, with aliens frequent); science-fiction fantasy (dragons are common; the gizmos are less plausible, and may include wands); and speculative fiction (human society and its possible future forms, which are either much better than what we have now or much worse). However, the membranes separating these subdivisions are permeable, and osmotic flow from one to another is the norm.

The lineage of "science fiction," broadly considered, is very long, and some of its literary ancestors are of the utmost respectability. Alberto Manguel has catalogued many in The Dictionary of Imaginary Places: Plato's account of Atlantis is among them, and Sir Thomas More's Utopia and Swift's Gulliver's Travels. Accounts of voyages to unknown realms with bizarre inhabitants are as old as Herodotus in his wilder moments, as old as One Thousand and One Nights, as old as Thomas the Rhymer. Folk tales, the Norse Sagas, and the adventure romances of chivalry are not-so-distant cousins of such tales, and have been drawn on by hundreds of imitators of The Lord of the Rings and/or Conan the Conqueror-works that previously fetched their water from the same wells, as did their precursors, George MacDonald and the H. Rider Haggard of She.

Jules Verne is probably the best known of the early gizmo-fictionalists, but Mary Sh.e.l.ley's Frankenstein could be thought of as the first "science fiction"-that is, the first fiction that had real science in it-inspired as it was by experiments with electricity, in particular the galvanizing of corpses. Some of her preoccupations have stayed with the genre (or genres) ever since: most specifically, what is the price that must be paid by Promethean Man for stealing fire from Heaven? Indeed, some commentators have proposed "science fiction" as the last fictional repository for theological speculation. Heaven, h.e.l.l, and aerial transport by means of wings having been more or less abandoned after Milton, outer s.p.a.ce was the only remaining neighbourhood where beings resembling G.o.ds, angels, and demons might still be found. J. R. R. Tolkien's friend and fellow fantasist C. S. Lewis even went so far as to compose a "science fiction" trilogy-very light on science but heavy on theology, the "s.p.a.ceship" being a coffin filled with roses and the temptation of Eve being re-enacted on the planet of Venus, complete with luscious fruit.

Rearranged human societies have been a constant in the tradition as well, and they have been used both to criticize our present state of affairs and to suggest more pleasant alternatives.... The nineteenth century, cheered on by its successes with sewage systems and prison reform, produced so many earnestly hopeful speculative fictions that the vogue was satirized not only by Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta Utopia Limited but also by Samuel Butler's Erewhon, where illness is a crime and crime is an illness.

However, as the optimism of the nineteenth century gave way to the Procrustean social dislocations of the twentieth-most notably in the former Soviet Union and the former Third Reich-literary utopias, whether serious or sardonic, were displaced by darker versions of themselves.... Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four are of course the best known of these many prescient badlands, with Karel apek's R.U.R. and the nightmarish fables of John Wyndham running close behind.

It's too bad that one term-science fiction-has served for so many variants, and too bad also that this term has acquired a dubious if not downright s.l.u.ttish reputation. True, the proliferation of sci-fi in the 1920s and 1930s gave rise to a great many bug-eyed-monster-bestrewn s.p.a.ce operas, followed by films and television shows that drew heavily on this odiferous cache....

In brilliant hands, however, the form can be brilliant....

Which brings us to Ursula K. Le Guin. No question about her literary quality: her graceful prose, carefully thought-through premises, psychological insight, and intelligent perception have earned her the National Book Award, the Kafka Award, five Hugos, five Nebulas, a Newbery, a Jupiter, a Gandalf, and an armful of other awards, great and small. Her first two books, Planet of Exile and Rocannon's World, were published in 1966, and since then she has published sixteen novels, as well as ten collections of stories.

Collectively, these books have created two major parallel universes: the universe of the Ek.u.men, which is sci-fi proper-s.p.a.ceships, travel among worlds, and so forth-and the world of Earthsea. The latter must be called "fantasy," I suppose, as it contains dragons and witches and even a school for wizards, though this inst.i.tution is a long way from the Hogwarts of Harry Potter. The Ek.u.men series may be said-very broadly-to concern itself with the nature of human nature: How far can we stretch and still remain human? What is essential to our being, what is contingent? The Earthsea series is occupied-again, very broadly speaking-with the nature of reality and the necessity of mortality, and also with language in relation to its matrix. (That's heavy weather to make of a series that has been promoted as suitable for age twelve, but perhaps the fault lies in the marketing directors. Like Alice In Wonderland, these tales speak to readers on many levels.) Le Guin's preoccupations are not divided into two strictly separate packages, of course: both of her worlds are scrupulously attentive to the uses and misuses of language; both have their characters fret over social gaffes and get snarled up in foreign customs; both worry about death. But in the Ek.u.men universe, although there is much strangeness, there is no magic, apart from the magic inherent in creation itself.

The astonishing thing about Le Guin as a writer is that she managed to create these two realms, not only in parallel, but at the same time. The first Earthsea book, A Wizard of Earthsea, appeared in 1968, and The Left Hand of Darkness, the famous cla.s.sic from the Ek.u.men series, in 1969. Either one would have been sufficient to establish Le Guin's reputation as a mistress of its genre; both together make one suspect arcane drugs or creative double-jointedness or ambidexterity. Not for nothing did Le Guin invoke handedness in her fourth t.i.tle: as soon as we start talking about the left hand, all sorts of biblical connotations gather. (Although the left hand is the sinister one, G.o.d too has a left hand, so left hands can't be all bad. Should your right hand know what your left hand is doing, and if not, why not? And so forth.) As Walter Benjamin once said, the decisive blows are struck left-handed.

Ursula K. Le Guin has continued to explore and describe and dramatize both of her major fictional realms over the thirty-six years that have pa.s.sed since her first novel was published. But since the stories in The Birthday of the World are Ek.u.men stories-with two exceptions-it's as well to concentrate on the science-fiction world rather than on the fantasy one. The general premises of the Ek.u.men series are as follows. There are many habitable planets in the universe. Long, long ago they were "seeded" by a people called the Hainish, s.p.a.ce travellers from an Earthlike planet, after which time pa.s.sed, disruptions occurred, and each society was left alone to develop along different lines.

Now, a benevolent federation called the Ek.u.men having been established, explorers are being sent out to see what has become of these far-flung but still hominid or perhaps even human societies. Conquest is not the aim, nor is missionary work: non-invasive, non-directive understanding and recording are the functions required of such explorers or amba.s.sadors, who are known as Mobiles. Various gizmos are provided to allow them to function amid the alien corn, and they are provided with a handy widget called the "ansible," a piece of technology we should all have because it allows for instantaneous transmission of information, thus cancelling out the delaying effects of the fourth dimension. Also, it never seems to crash like your Internet e-mail program. I'm all for it.

Here it is necessary to mention that Le Guin's mother was a writer, her husband is an historian, and her father was an anthropologist; thus she has been surrounded all her life by people whose interests have dovetailed with her own. The writing connection, through her mother, is obvious. Her husband's historical knowledge must have come in very handy: there's more than an echo in her work of the kinds of usually unpleasant events that change what we call "history." But her father's discipline, anthropology, deserves special mention.

If the "fantasy" end of science fiction owes a large debt to folk tale and myth and saga, the "science fiction" end owes an equally large debt to the development of archeology and anthropology as serious disciplines, as distinct from the tomb-looting and exploration-for-exploitation that preceded them and continued alongside them. Layard's discovery of Nineveh in the 1840s had the effect of a can opener on Victorian thinking about the past; Troy and Pompeii and ancient Egypt were similarly mesmerizing. Through new discoveries and fresh excavations, European concepts of past civilizations were rearranged, imaginative doors were opened, wardrobe choices were expanded. If things were once otherwise, perhaps they could be otherwise again, especially where clothing and s.e.x were concerned-two matters that particularly fascinated Victorian and early twentieth-century imaginative writers, who longed for less of the former and more of the latter.

Anthropology arrived a little later. Cultures were discovered in remote places that were very different from the modern West, and rather than being wiped out or subjugated, they were taken seriously and studied. How are these people like us? How are they different? Is it possible to understand them? What are their foundation myths, their beliefs about an afterlife? How do they arrange their marriages, how do their kinship systems work? What are their foods? How about their (a) clothing and (b) s.e.x? Which were usually discovered-through the work of various perhaps overeager inquirers such as Margaret Mead-to be (a) scantier and (b) more satisfactory than ours.

Anthropologists do-or are supposed to do-more or less what the Mobiles in Le Guin's Ek.u.men construction are supposed to do: they go to distant sh.o.r.es, they look, they explore foreign societies and try to figure them out. Then they record, and then they transmit. Le Guin knows the tricks of the trade, and also the pitfalls: her Mobiles are mistrusted and misled while they are in the field, just as real anthropologists have been. They're used as political p.a.w.ns, they're scorned as outsiders, they're feared because they have unknown powers. But they are also dedicated professionals and trained observers, and human beings with personal lives of their own. This is what makes them and the stories they tell believable, and Le Guin's handling of them engaging as writing in its own right.

It's informative to compare two of Le Guin's introductions: the one she wrote for The Left Hand of Darkness in 1976, seven years after the book was first published, and the foreword she's now written for The Birthday of the World. The Left Hand of Darkness takes place on the planet of Gethen, or Winter, where the inhabitants are neither men nor women nor hermaphrodites. Instead they have phases: a non-s.e.xual phase is followed by a s.e.xual phase, and during the latter each individual changes into whichever gender is suitable for the occasion. Thus anyone at all may be, over a lifetime, both mother and father, both penetrator and penetree. As the story opens, the "king" is both mad and pregnant, and the non-Gethenian observer from the Ek.u.men is nothing if not confused.

This novel appeared at the beginning of the hottest period of 1970s feminism, when emotions were running very high on subjects having to do with genders and their roles. Le Guin was accused of wanting everyone to be an androgyne and of predicting that in the future they would be; conversely, of being antifeminist because she'd used the p.r.o.noun "he" to denote persons not in "kemmer"-the s.e.xual phase.

Her introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness is therefore somewhat brisk. Science fiction should not be merely extrapolative, she says; it should not take a present trend and project it into the future, thus arriving via logic at a prophetic truth. Science fiction cannot predict, nor can any fiction, the variables being too many. Her own book is a "thought-experiment," like Frankenstein. It begins with "Let's say," follows that with a premise, and then watches to see what happens next. "In a story so conceived," she says, "the moral complexity proper to the modern novel need not be sacrificed ... thought and intuition can move freely within bounds set only by the terms of the experiment, which may be very large indeed."

The purpose of a thought-experiment, she writes, is to "describe reality, the present world." "A novelist's business is lying"-lying interpreted in the novelist's usual way, that is, as a devious method of truth-telling. Consequently the androgyny described in her book is neither prediction nor prescription, just description: androgyny, metaphorically speaking, is a feature of all human beings. With those who don't understand that metaphor is metaphor and fiction is fiction, she is more than a little irritated. One suspects she's received a lot of extremely odd fan mail.

The Foreword to The Birthday of the World is mellower. Twenty-six years later, the author has fought her battles and is an established feature of the sci-fi landscape. She can afford to be less didactic, more charmingly candid, a little scattier. The universe of the Ek.u.men now feels comfortable to her, like "an old shirt." No sense in expecting it to be consistent, though: "Its Time Line is like something a kitten pulled out of the knitting basket, and its history consists largely of gaps." In this Foreword, Le Guin describes process rather than theory: the genesis of each story, the problems she had to think her way through. Typically, she doesn't concoct her worlds: she finds herself in them, and then begins to explore them, just like, well, an anthropologist. "First to create difference," she says, "... then to let the fiery arc of human emotion leap and close the gap: this acrobatics of the imagination fascinates me and satisfies me as almost no other."

There are seven shorter stories in The Birthday of the World, and one that might qualify as a novella. Six of the first seven are Ek.u.men stories-they're part of the "old shirt." The seventh probably belongs there, though its author isn't sure. The eighth is set in a different universe altogether-the generic, shared, science-fiction "future." All but the eighth are largely concerned with-as Le Guin says-"peculiar arrangements of gender and s.e.xuality."

All imagined worlds must make some provision for s.e.x, with or without black leather and tentacles, and the peculiarity of the arrangements is an old motif in science fiction: one thinks not only of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland, where the genders live separately, but also of W. H. Hudson's A Crystal Age, featuring an antlike neuter state, or John Wyndham's Consider Her Ways, also based on a hymenoptera model, or Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time, which tries for absolute gender equality. (Men breastfeed: watch for this trend.) But Le Guin takes things much further. In the first story, "Coming of Age in Karhide," we see Gethen/Winter not through the eyes of a Mobile but through those of a Gethenian just coming into adolescence: which gender will s/he turn into first? This story is not only erotic but happy. Why not, in a world where s.e.x is always either spectacular or of no concern whatsoever?

Things aren't so jolly in "The Matter of Seggri," where there's a gender imbalance: far more women than men. The women run everything, and marry each other as life partners. The rare boy children are spoiled by the women, but as men they must live a segregated life in castles, where they dress up, show off, stage public fights, and are rented out as studs. They don't have much fun. It's like being trapped in the World Wrestling Federation, forever.

"Unchosen Love" and "Mountain Ways" take place on a world called O, created by Le Guin in A Fisherman of the Inland Sea. On O, you must be married to three other people but can have s.e.x with only two of them. The quartets must consist of a Morning man and a Morning woman-who can't have s.e.x-and an Evening man and an Evening woman, who also can't have s.e.x. But the Morning man is expected to have s.e.x with the Evening woman and also the Evening man, and the Evening woman is expected to have s.e.x with the Morning man and also the Morning woman. Putting these quartets together is one of the problems the characters face, and keeping them straight-who's for you, who's taboo-is a problem for both reader and writer. Le Guin had to draw charts. As she says, "I like thinking about complex social relationships which produce and frustrate highly charged emotional relationships."

"Solitude" is a meditative story about a world in which conviviality is deeply distrusted. Women live alone in their own houses in an "auntring" or village, where they make baskets and do gardening, and practise the non-verbal art of "being aware." Only the children go from house to house, learning lore. When girls come of age they form part of an auntring, but boys must go off to join adolescent packs and scratch a living in the wilderness. They fight it out, and those who survive become breeding males, living shyly in hermit huts, guarding the auntrings from a distance, and being visited by the women, who "scout" for purposes of mating. This setup, despite its spiritual satisfactions, would not suit everyone.

"Old Music and the Slave Women" comes very close to home, inspired as it was by a visit to a former plantation in the American South. On the planet of Werel, slavers and anti-slavers are at war, and s.e.x among the slavers is a matter of raping the field hands. The chief character, an intelligence officer with the Ek.u.men emba.s.sy, gets into arguments over human rights and then bad trouble. Of all the stories, this one comes closest to substantiating Le Guin's claim that science fiction describes our own world. Werel could be any society torn by civil war: wherever it's happening, it's always brutal, and Le Guin, although at times a movingly lyrical writer, has never shied away from necessary gore.

The t.i.tle story is constructed on an Inca base, with a splash of ancient Egypt. A man and a woman together form G.o.d. Both positions are hereditary and created by brothersister marriage; the duties of G.o.d include divination by dancing, which causes the world to be born anew each year. Governance is carried out by G.o.d's messengers, or "angels." What happens when a foreign but powerful presence enters this highly structured world and the belief system that sustains it crumbles? You can imagine, or you can read The Conquest of Peru. Nevertheless, this delicate story is strangely courageous, strangely hopeful: the world ends, but then, too, it is always beginning.

The last story, "Paradises Lost," continues the note of renewal. Many generations have been born and have died onboard a long-distance s.p.a.ceship. During the voyage a new religion has sprung up, whose adherents believe they are actually, now, in Heaven. (If so, Heaven is just as boring as some have always feared.) Then the ship reaches the destination proposed for it centuries earlier, and its inhabitants must decide whether to remain in "Heaven" or to descend to a "dirtball" whose flora, fauna, and microbes are completely alien to them. The most enjoyable part of this story, for me, was the release from claustrophobia: try as I might, I couldn't imagine why anyone would prefer the ship.

Le Guin is on the side of the dirtball too; and, by extension, of our very own dirtball. Whatever else she may do-wherever her curious intelligence may take her, whatever twists and knots of motive and plot and genitalia she may invent-she never loses touch with her reverence for the immense what is. All her stories are, as she has said, metaphors for the one human story; all her fantastic planets are this one, however disguised. "Paradises Lost" shows us our own natural world as a freshly discovered Paradise Regained, a realm of wonder; and in this, Le Guin is a quintessentially American writer, of the sort for whom the quest for the Peaceable Kingdom is ongoing. Perhaps, as Jesus hinted, the kingdom of G.o.d is within; or perhaps, as William Blake glossed, it is within a wildflower, seen aright.

The story-and the book-ends with a minimalist dance, as an old woman and a crippled old man celebrate, indeed worship, the ordinary dirt that sustains them. "Swaying, she lifted her bare feet from the dirt and set them down again while he stood still, holding her hands. They danced together that way."

Arguing Against Ice Cream:.

Enough: Staying Human.

in an Engineered Age.

by Bill McKibben.

Enough, by Bill McKibben, is a pa.s.sionate, succinct, chilling, closely argued, sometimes hilarious, touchingly well-intentioned, and essential summary of the future proposed by "science" for the human race. This is the same Bill McKibben who wrote The End of Nature, about how h.o.m.o sapiens has been rearranging the biosphere with the aid of genetically modified plants to suit what it believes is its own interests, and Long Distance, about running marathons, and many essays for The New Yorker, the New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, and others.

Bill McKibben appears to be a smart and thoughtful person but also kindly and optimistic, as far as can be told from his prose. He likes going for walks in the woods, and he seems very fit, and his jacket photo looks like someone you wouldn't want playing against you at bridge because he'd already know what you had in your hand. In other words, he could qualify for membership in a muscular branch of upper-level-I.Q. geekhood, and cannot be simply dismissed as a dull-normal Luddite too dumb to understand the nifty customized body-and-brain parts soon to be on offer to you and yours.

On offer for a price, of course. Ah yes, the price. The traditional fee for this kind of thing was your soul, but who pays any attention to that tattered theological rag anymore, since it can't be located with a brain probe? And hey, the Special Deal is a super package! How could you refuse? It contains so much that human dreams are made of.

Faust wanted the same sort of stuff. Many have wanted it: eternal youth, G.o.dlike beauty, hyper-intelligence, Charles Atlas strength. Those of us brought up on the back pages of comic books know the appeal. They'll never laugh again when you sit down at the piano because now you'll have X-Men fingers and Mozart's genius; they won't dare to kick sand in your face at the beach because you'll be built like Hercules; you'll never again be refused a date because of your ugly blackheads, which will have been banished, along with many another feature you could do without. Turning to more adult concerns such as death, you won't have to invest in a cement coffin container because not only will your loved one be safe tonight, but he or she will still be alive, and forever! And so will you.

The line forms to the right, and it'll be a long one. (Enough mentions a couple of California artists who set up a piece of conceptual art in the form of a boutique called Gene Genies Worldwide, with printed brochures ill.u.s.trating what you could buy, and were deluged with serious inquiries.) Anyone who thinks there won't be a demand for what's putatively on sale is hallucinating. But along comes Bill McKibben with his sidewalk-preacher's sandwich board, denouncing the whole enterprise and prophesying doom. There will be catcalls of killjoy and spoilsport, not to mention troglodyte, nay-sayer, and hand-wringer. Like Prince Charles, who's just come out against nanotechnology on the grounds that it could reduce the world to grey goo, McKibben will be told to keep his nose out of it because it's none of his business.

"Mankind was my business," laments Marley's ghost when it's too late for him. And so says Bill McKibben. Mankind is his business. He addresses the greedy little Scrooge in all of us and points out to that greedy little Scrooge why he should not want more and more, and more, and, just to top it off, more.

More of what? To that in a minute, but first, a digression on the word more. Two emblematic uses of more spring to mind. The first is, of course, the echoing "more" p.r.o.nounced by Oliver Twist when he is being starved in a foundlings' home by venal officials. That "more" is the legitimate response to "not enough." It's the "more" of real need, and only the hard-hearted and wickedly self-righteous Mr. b.u.mbles of this world can be outraged by it. The second "more" is in the film Key Largo, in the remarkable exchange between the Humphrey Bogart hero character and the Edward G. Robinson evil crook. The crook is asked what he wants, and he doesn't know. Humphrey knows, however. "He wants more," he says. And this is what the crook does want: more, and more than he can possibly use; or, rather, more than he can appreciate, dedicated as he is to mere acc.u.mulation and mere power. For the alternative to "more," in McKibben's book, is not "less" but "enough." Its epigraph might well be that old folk saying, "Enough is as good as a feast."

The "enough" of the t.i.tle, seen rightly-McKibben implies-is already a feast. It's us, as we are, with maybe a few allowable improvements. More than that is too much. These tempting "mores"-for there are many of them-grow on the more and more Trees of Knowledge that crowd the modern scientific landscape so thickly you can't see the forest for them. McKibben takes axe in hand and sets out to clear a path. Which apples should be plucked, which left alone? How hard should we think before taking the fateful bite? And why shouldn't we pig out, and what's our motivation if we do? Is it the same old story-we want to be as the G.o.ds? If it's that story, we've read it, in its many versions. It's never had a happy ending. Not so far.

The items on the smorgasbord of human alteration divide roughly into three. First, genetic alteration, or gene splicing, whereby parents who are five feet tall and bald can give birth to a six-footer with long blond hair who looks like the next-door neighbour. Well, it'll provide some new excuses. ("Honey, we chose that! Remember?") Second, nanotechnology, or the development of single-atom-layer gizmos that can replicate themselves and a.s.semble and disa.s.semble matter. Some of these might be sent into our bodies to repair them, like the miniaturized submarine containing the memorable Raquel Welch in the film Fantastic Voyage. Third, cybernetics, or the melding of man with machine, like the bionic man. At least we'll all be able to get the lids off jars.

There's a fourth idea that's glanced at-cryogenics, or getting yourself or your budget-version head flash-frozen until such time as the yellow-brick road to immortality has been built; whereupon you'll be unfrozen and restored to youth and health, and, if the head-only option has been chosen, a new body can be grown for you from a few sc.r.a.pings of your-or somebody else's-DNA. Investing even a small amount of belief in this scheme puts you in the same league as those who happily buy the Brooklyn Bridge from shifty-looking men in overcoats, for the company-yes, it would be a company-in charge of your frozen head would need to be not only perennially solvent-bankruptcy would equal meltdown-but also impeccably honest.

Every field of human endeavour attracts its quota of con men and scam artists, but this one would seem to be a natural. What's to stop the operators from banking your money, subjecting you to the initial gelatification, and then, pleading electrical failure, dumping your unpleasantly melting self into the trash, or, better-waste not, want not, and the shareholders expect a solid bottom line-recycling you for cat food? The Pyramids of the mummified Egyptian kings, thoroughly pillaged once the relatives' backs were turned, stand as a gloss on this kind of thinking, as does London's Highgate Cemetery, a Garden of Eternity parcelled out in pricey lots that became an overgrown thicket once the money stream petered out.

But McKibben's fervent arguments are of a more clean-cut kind: he is not a novelist or a poet, and thus does not descend all the way into the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart. He a.s.sumes a certain amount of sincerity and probity in the less-wacky advocates of these developments, and his appeals are directed to our rational and ethical faculties. We should act, he believes, out of respect for human history and the human race.

He first tackles genetic engineering, already present in soybeans and not so far off for h.o.m.o sapiens now that we have the luminous green rabbit and the goat/spider. Gene splicing is the modern answer to the eternal urge to make a more perfect model of ourselves. The novel of record is Mary Sh.e.l.ley's Frankenstein: we just can't stop tinkering, partly because it's so interesting and partly because we have a high opinion of our own abilities; but we risk creating monsters.

Gene splicing depends on cloning-McKibben explains how-but is not the same. It involves inserting selected genes-of those other than the parents-into an egg, which is then implanted in the usual way (or will be until the bottled babies of Brave New World make their appearance and we can do away with the womb altogether). If we become genetically enhanced in this way-enhanced by our parents before we're born-the joy and mystery will go out of life, says McKibben, because we won't have to strive for mastery. Our achievements won't be "ours" but will have been programmed into us; we'll never know whether we are really feeling "our" emotions, or whether they-like the false memories embedded in the replicants in the film Blade Runner-are off the shelf. We won't be our unique selves, we'll just be the sum totals of market whims. We truly will be the "meat machines" that some scientists already term us. Right now about all our parents can pick for us are our names, but what if they could pick everything about us? (And you thought your mother had bad taste in sofas!) Worse, we'll be caught in a keep-up-with-the-Joneses compet.i.tion whereby each new generation of babies will have to have all the latest enhancements-will have to be more intelligent, more beautiful, more disease-free, longer-lived, than the generation before. (Babies of the rich, it goes without saying, because there's gold in them thar frills.) Thus each new generation will be sui generis-isolated, disconsolate, as out of date as last year's car model before they're even twenty-one, each of them stuck on a lily pad of enhancement a few hops behind the one that follows them. In addition to that, they'll be cut off from history-from their own family tree-because who knows what family trees they'll really be perpetuating? They'll bear little relation to their so-called ancestors. The loneliness and the sense of disconnection could be extreme.

McKibben does not go on to explore the ultimate h.e.l.l this situation could produce. Imagine the adolescent whining and sulking that will be visited upon the parents who have chosen their children's features out of a catalogue and-inevitably-will have chosen wrong. "I didn't ask to be born" will be replaced by resentments such as "I didn't ask to have blue eyes" or "I didn't ask to be a math whiz." Burn that gene brochure! If your kid whines about not being enhanced enough, you can just say you couldn't afford it. (The advocates of gene enhancement might respond by saying that since you'll be able to choose your child's temperament as well, naturally you'll pick a type that will never do any adolescent whining or sulking. Pay no attention: these people will not be talking about flesh-and-blood children, but about Stepford Kids.) Again, McKibben doesn't go all the way down, into the dark realms of envy, cheating, payoffs, and megalomaniacal revenge. What's to prevent your enemy from bribing your gene doctor so that your baby turns out like Hannibal the Cannibal?

But what about heritable diseases? you may reasonably ask. Why should any child get stuck with cerebral palsy, or autism, or schizophrenia, or Huntington's ch.o.r.ea, or the many other maladies that genes are heir to? They shouldn't if there's a remedy, and there is. McKibben points out that these conditions can be eliminated without taking the final step. (After Enough was published and before this review was written, a Canadian team cracked the gene for autism. Help is on the way.) Once their genome has been a.n.a.lyzed, parents at risk could be notified of any defects, and could go the in vitro route, with fertilized eggs lacking the culpable gene chosen for implanting. This "somatic gene therapy" would not involve the addition of anyone else's genes. Plastic surgery, hormones, vitamin pills, and somatic gene therapy are enough, says McKibben; gene splicing is too much.

Next, McKibben delves into nanotechnology, which is also well on the way. The applicable folk tale for nanotechnology is "The Sorcerer's Apprentice"-what if you get the process started, but the self-replicating nan.o.bot escapes, and you can't turn the darn thing off? We might create an a.s.sembler that makes food-dirt in one end, potatoes out the other-or something that destroys bioforms hostile to us. But what if such a nan.o.bot goes on the rampage and attacks all bioforms? This is where Prince Charles's apprehension about "grey goo" comes in. It's a real fear, and one discussed by McKibben.

Cybernetics and artificial intelligence also get a look-in, as man-and-machine combinations are occupying some of our better-paid minds. Visions of microchips implanted in your brain dance in their heads-well, we already have pacemakers, so what's the difference? Why shouldn't we baptize artificial intelligence doodads because they can be made to resemble us so much that maybe they have whatever we think merits baptism? Call it a soul; why not? Maybe we can get enhanced smellability, X-ray vision, Spidey Sense, the works. Artificial o.r.g.a.s.ms, better than the real thing. Everything will be better than the real thing! Why shouldn't we have eyes in the backs of our heads? Why do we only have one mouth that has to perform several functions-talking, eating, whistling? If we had several buccal orifices we'd be able to do all these things at once! (Sign here. You owe it to yourself. Because you deserve it.) There's been quite a lot of chat about the shortcomings we've had to put up with due to Mother Nature, the dirty, treacherous cow, and this is the not-so-cleverly-hidden subtext of a lot of Brave New Worldtype thinking. These folks hate Nature, and they hate themselves as part of it, or her. McKibben cites an amazing speech given by Max More (last name chosen by himself) to the Extropian Convention ("extropy," coined as the opposite to "entropy"). This speech took the form of a dissing of Mother Nature, and said, essentially, thanks for nothing and goodbye. Nature has made so many mistakes, the chief one being death. Why do we have to get old and die? Why is man the one creature that foresees his own death?

As in many religions-and the energy propelling the wilder fringes of this "more" enterprise is religious in essence-there has to be a second birth, one that gets around the indignity of having come out of a body-a female body-and, come to think of it, of having a body yourself. All that guck and blood and cells and death. Why do we have to eat? And, by implication, defecate. So messy. Maybe we can fix our digestive tracts so we just slip out a little pellet-say, once a month. Maybe we can be born again, this time out of an artificial head instead of a natural body, and download the contents of our brains into machines, and linger around in cybers.p.a.ce, as in William Gibson's novels. Though if you've read William Gibson, you'll know the place is a queasy nightmare.

All the enhancements McKibben discusses are converging on the biggie, which is none other than the final nose-thumb at Nature-immortality. Immortality doesn't fare so well in myth and story. Either you get it but forget to request eternal youth too and become a crumbling horror (t.i.thonus, the Sibyl of c.u.mae, Swift's Struldbrugs), or you seize the immortality and the vitality but lose your soul and must live by feeding on the blood of the innocent (Melmoth the Wanderer, vampires, and so forth). The stories are clear: G.o.ds are immortal, men die, try to change it and you'll end up worse off.

That doesn't stop us from hankering. McKibben recognizes the impulse: "Objecting even slightly to immortality," he rightly says, "is a little like arguing against ice cream-eternal life has only been humanity's great dream since the moment we became conscious." But unlike all previous generations, ours might be able to achieve it. This would alter us beyond recognition. We'd become a different species-one living in eternal bliss, in the eyes of its proponents; sort of like-well, angels, or superhuman beings, anyway. It would certainly mean an end to narrative. If life is endless, why tell stories? No more beginnings and middles because there will be no more endings. No Shakespeare for us, or Dante, or, well, any art, really. It's all infested with mortality and reeks of earthiness. Our new angel-selves will no longer need or understand our art. They might have other art, though it would be pretty bloodless.

But once we're well and truly immortal, what would we do all day? Wouldn't we get tired of the endlessness, the monotony, the lack of meaningful event? Wouldn't we get bored? Nope. We'd sit around and contemplate problems such as: "Where did the universe come from?" "Why is there something rather than nothing?" "What is the meaning of conscious existence?" Is that to be the result of all this admittedly fascinating science-a tedious first-year philosophy seminar? "Not to be impolite," says McKibben, "but for this we trade our humanity?"

That's the good version of the immortal mind. I encountered the bad version in a paperback I received through a high school book-a-month club. Donovan's Brain was its t.i.tle, and the brain in question was being kept alive in a large fish tank and fed on brain food. The hope of the scientists doing this was that the brain would grow in power and strength, and solve problems, such as "Why is there something rather than nothing?" and benefit humankind. But Donovan when he had a body was a stock manipulator or the equivalent, and he bent his newfound mind powers in the direction of world domination, zapping people who got in his way. A big brain does not mean a nice brain. This was made clear to me at the age of twelve, and it's made even clearer in Enough. There are some very clever people at work on the parts that will go into making up our immortality, and what they're doing is on some levels fascinating-like playing with the biggest toy box you've ever seen-but they are not the people who should be deciding our future. Asking these kinds of scientists what improved human nature should be like is like asking ants what you should have in your backyard. Of course they would say "more ants."

And while we're on the subject, who exactly is "we"? The "we," that is, who are promised all these goodies. "We" will be the "GenRich," the rich in genes. "We" are certainly not the six billion people already on the planet, nor the ten billion projected for the year 2050-those will be the "GenPoor." "We," when we appear, will be a select few, and since our enhanced genes and our immortality are going to be so expensive, and will not survive-for instance-being squashed flat by tanks, we will have to take steps to protect ourselves. Doubtless "we" will devise almost impenetrable walls, as in the Zamyatin novel of the same name, or "we" will live in a castle, with "them"-the serfs and peasants, the dimwits, the mortals-roiling around outside. We will talk like James Dewey Watson; we'll say things like "It's not much fun being around dumb people." In fact, we'll behave a lot like the aristocrats of old, convinced of our own divine right. The serfs and peasants will hate us. Not to throw cold water on it, but if the serfs and peasants are true to form, sooner or later they'll get hold of some pitchforks and torches and storm the barricades. So to avoid the peasants, we'll have to go into outer s.p.a.ce. Having fun yet?

The agenda of those who visualize themselves as the GenRich-like Past Lifers, Future Lifers never see themselves playing the role of ditch digger-is being pushed in the name of that magic duo, progress and inevitability, the twins that always make an appearance when quite a few potential shareholders smell megabucks in the air. (Along with them come the usual my-d.i.c.k-is-bigger adjectives, as McKibben points out-guts and risk-taking and so forth-so if you don't rush out and get your genes spliced and your head frozen, you're some sort of a wuss.) "Progress" has deluded many, but surely its pretensions as a rallying slogan have been exploded by now. As for "inevitability," it's the rapist's argument: the thing is going to happen anyway, so why not just lie back and enjoy it? Resistance is futile. (That was the old advice: now you're told to scream and vomit, thus influencing the outcome. Times change.) McKibben takes on both of the magic twins, and is particularly moving on "inevitability." We still have choice, he says. Just because a thing has been invented doesn't mean you have to use it. He offers as exempla the atomic bomb; the j.a.panese samurais' rejection of guns; the Chinese abandonment of advanced sea power; and the Amish, who examine each new technology and accept or reject it according to social and spiritual criteria. We, too, he says, can accept or reject according to social and spiritual criteria. We can, and we should. We must decide as ourselves-as who we already are as human beings. We must decide from the fullness of our present humanity, flawed though it may be. As I've said, McKibben is an optimist. I agree with him about what we should do, but I'm not too sure we'll do it.

The fact is-and this is not an argument McKibben uses explicitly-that the argument for the perfectibility of humankind rests on a logical fallacy. Thus: man is by definition imperfect, say those who would perfect him. But those who would perfect him are themselves, by their own definition, imperfect. And imperfect beings cannot make perfect decisions. The decision about what const.i.tutes human perfection would have to be a perfect decision; otherwise the result would be not perfection but imperfection. As witness the desire for several different mouths.

Perhaps our striving for perfection should take a different, more Blakean form. Perhaps Infinity can be seen in a grain of sand, and Eternity in an hour. Perhaps happiness is not a goal but a road. Perhaps the pursuit of happiness is that happiness. Perhaps we should take a clue from Tennyson, and separate wisdom and knowledge, and admit that wisdom cannot be cloned or manufactured. Perhaps that admission is wisdom. Perhaps enough should be enough for us. Perhaps we should leave well enough alone.

George Orwell:.

Some Personal.

Connections.

I grew up with George Orwell. I was born in 1939, and Animal Farm was published in 1945. Thus I was able to read it at age nine. It was lying around the house, and I mistook it for a book about talking animals, sort of like The Wind in the Willows. I knew nothing about the kind of politics in the book-the child's version of politics then, just after the war, consisted of the simple notion that Hitler was bad but dead. So I gobbled up the adventures of Napoleon and s...o...b..ll, the smart, greedy, upwardly mobile pigs, and Squealer the spin-doctor, and Boxer the n.o.ble but thick-witted horse, and the easily led, slogan-chanting sheep, without making any connection with historical events.

To say that I was horrified by this book would be an understatement. The fate of the farm animals was so grim, the pigs were so mean and mendacious and treacherous, the sheep were so stupid. Children have a keen sense of injustice, and this was the thing that upset me the most: the pigs were so unjust. I cried my eyes out when Boxer the horse had an accident and was carted off to be made into dog food instead of being given the quiet corner of the pasture he'd been promised.

The whole experience was deeply disturbing to me, but I am forever grateful to George Orwell for alerting me early to the danger flags I've tried to watch out for since. In the world of Animal Farm, most speechifying and public palaver is bulls.h.i.t and instigated lying, and though many characters are good-hearted and mean well, they can be frightened into closing their eyes to what's really going on. The pigs browbeat the others with ideology, then twist that ideology to suit their own purposes: their language games were evident to me even at that age. As Orwell taught, it isn't the labels-Christianity, socialism, Islam, democracy, Two Legs Bad, Four Legs Good, the works-that are definitive, but the acts done in their names.