Previous: Salome & Other Decadent Fantasies

Next: The Wayward Muse

A tireless believer in the advancement of biotechnology and the wonders it can bring to humanity, Brian Stableford has used his fiction, both short and long, to explore all sides of the advantages and hazards of tinkering with ourselves, our environment, and our planet.

Eleven of his best stories in Designer Genes: Tales from the Biotech Revolution, postulating what life might be like when anything and everything is subject to the whims and desires of man; who will always want something better, bigger, larger.

Current, cutting-edge advances in technology and medicine are taken to their rigorous, logically extrapolated extreme, and seen from the views of people and organizations both for and against this kind of genetic and biological manipulation.

CONTENTS:
What Can Chloe Want?
The Invisible Worm
The Age of Innocence
Snowball in Hell
The Last Supper
The Facts of Life
Hot Blood
The House of Mourning
Another Branch of the Family Tree
The Milk of Human Kindness
The Pipes of Pan

Published by Five Star in March 2004
ISBN:1-59414-033-2
Cover design by Christopher Watt
Cover art by Charles Bernard

Review by Ian Braidwood

The first surprising thing about this collection is that it's 15,000 words longer than it's companion volume, Sexual Chemistry. The second is that Charles Bernard must actually have read at least The Invisible Worm, if not the entire volume before painting the cover art; a rare and pleasing distinction to add to this collection's already considerable merits.

Like Sexual Chemistry, Designer Genes is a mix of stories sharing a biotechnological theme and like the former volume, the stories range from the quirky to the profound; exploring the potential and the potential abuses of this new technology.

The volume opens with an introduction, explaining how an essay by evolutionary biologist JBS Haldane fired Brian's enthusiasm for biotechnonlgy. Haldane also predicted the current resistance to biotechnology and pointed out that it would be unreasonable in the light of the fact that humans have been manipulating life for longer than we have been writing.

The stories start soberly with What Can Chloë Want, which helps to ground the collection; though it doesn't grab your attention the way Bedside Conversations did. Nevertheless, Chloë reminds you that biotechnology will afffect real people and can be considered critical of people who take too idealogical approach to the issues.

The Invisible Worm and The Age of Innocence are lighter than Chloë, though Brian isn't trying to present a genetic engineering Elysium for our future, but a world which will have its own problems and issues. The question is whether, even with the problems, biotechnology can help to improve life for people and Brian's answer is an emphatic yes.

Even if there were no other stories in Designer Genes, Snowball in Hell would justify buying a copy. It is a true masterpeice and deserves to be a classic. In a way, it is a reaction to the human genome project and its surprising finding that we all have fewer genes that expected. It refers to Orwell's Animal Farm, but owes more to Well's The Island of Dr Moreau, to which it also refers. However, the question really addressed by Snowball is what qualitfies an organism to human rights? It is a wonderful illustration of how dogmatic approaches fail in the real world and cause a lot of needless suffering in our world.

Consider Designer genes heartily recommended for everyone, even if they don't usually read science fiction. It will do what the very best science fiction does; make you think.