Bio-Futures: Science Fiction Stories About Biological Metamorphosis

by Pamela Sargent

• Introduction - Pamela Sargent
1 • The Planners - (1968) - Kate Wilhelm
27 • Slow Tuesday Night - (1965) - R. A. Lafferty
39 • In re Glover - (1972) - Leonard Tushnet
55 • Emancipation: A Romance of the Times to Come - (1971) - Thomas M. Disch
97 • Nine Lives - (1969) - Ursula K. Le Guin
133 • Call Me Joe - (1957) - Poul Anderson
183 • The Immortals - (1958) - James E. Gunn [as by James Gunn]
253 • The Weariest River - (1973) - Thomas N. Scortia
305 • Day Million - (1966) - Frederik Pohl
315 • Watershed - (1955) - James Blish

Suppose we could:

—genetically alter our bodies so that we could settle alien environments

—use cryonics (the freezing of tissues and organs) to preserve seriously ill people until a cure is found to treat them, or freeze people now alive so that they could be revived in a future when immortality is a reality

—reproduce ourselves by using artificial wombs, test-tube fertilization, or cloning

—plant electronics in human brains so that we could control behavior seen as undesirable

All these possibilities may become actualities in the near future. Will we use these technological advances to transcend our biological destinies, or will we refuse to meddle with nature and reject them altogether? In this collection, Kate Wilhelm, R. A. Lafferty, Leonard Tushnet, Thomas M. Disch, Ursula K. Le Guin, Poul Anderson, James Gunn, Thomas N. Scortia, Frederik Pohl, and James Blish imaginatively consider what our biological future selves will be like.

Genres: Science Fiction, Anthologies

344 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

Pamela Sargent has won the Nebula Award, the Locus Award, and has been a finalist for the Hugo Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, and the Sidewise Award for alternate history. In 2012, she was honored with the Pilgrim Award by the Science Fiction Research Association for lifetime achievement in science fiction scholarship. She is the author of the novels Cloned Lives, The Sudden Star, Watchstar, The Golden Space, The Alien Upstairs, Eye of the Comet, Homesmind, Alien Child, The Shore of Women, Venus of Dreams, Venus of Shadows, Child of Venus, Climb the Wind, and Ruler of the Sky. Her most recent short story collection is Thumbprints, published by Golden Gryphon Press, with an introduction by James Morrow. The Washington Post Book World has called her “one of the genre's best writers.”

In the 1970s, she edited the Women of Wonder series, the first collections of science fiction by women; her other anthologies include Bio-Futures and, with British writer Ian Watson as co-editor, Afterlives. Two anthologies, Women of Wonder, The Classic Years: Science Fiction by Women from the 1940s to the 1970s and Women of Wonder, The Contemporary Years: Science Fiction by Women from the 1970s to the 1990s, were published by Harcourt Brace in 1995; Publishers Weekly called these two books “essential reading for any serious sf fan.” Her most recent anthology is Conqueror Fantastic, out from DAW Books in 2004. Tor Books reissued her 1983 young adult novel Earthseed, selected as a Best Book for Young Adults by the American Library Association, and a sequel, Farseed, in early 2007. A third volume, Seed Seeker, was published in November of 2010 by Tor. Earthseed has been optioned by Paramount Pictures, with Melissa Rosenberg, scriptwriter for all of the Twilight films, writing the script and producing through her Tall Girls Productions.

A collection, Puss in D.C. and Other Stories, is out; her novel Season of the Cats is out in hardcover and will be available in paperback from Wildside Press. The Shore of Women has been optioned for development as a TV series by Super Deluxe Films, part of Turner Broadcasting.

Pamela Sargent lives in Albany, New York.

Reviews

[Glen Engel-Cox · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Introduction,” Pamela Sargent — Sargent goes into the ethical dilemmas around biological modification, pointing out that we have already engaged in doing so by our research and success in defeating certain diseases, like polio. The point isn’t whether we are going to mess with our bodies, but how we will. In the decades since this introduction was published, as she suspected, the conflict between older belief systems and the desire of people to take control of their bodies has only increased. Sargent does a nice survey of what’s been written in SF in the past and delivers a manifesto of sorts for intelligent use of current science to inform the future.

“The Planners,” Kate Wilhelm — This is a very disorienting story as the protagonist daydreams throughout, some of which are fantasies, some of which are nightmares, such that you don’t really know what is what. Wilhelm is an interesting writer, and the subject of trying to distill the biological element that enables some of us to learn faster than others and apply it to the slower learners, makes for a compelling story, but the way this was told, I just couldn’t follow the threads.

“Slow Tuesday Night,” R.A. Lafferty — I usually don’t understand Lafferty stories. But not this one. It’s absurb, but absurb with a point. If the pace of progress increases, then, Lafferty says, eventually it will be so fast that someone could make and lose a fortune multiple times a night. While this is not a realistic story by any account, it’s amusing for what Lafferty points out as the preoccupations of humans freed from the constraints of time.

“In Re Glover,” Leonard Tushnet — I know I’ve read this story a couple of times before, including within the last ten years, but on this reading I found it more interesting and pointed than in the past (in terms of star ratings, I added a star). Perhaps it’s because of recent events in which the US Supreme Court has shown themselves willing to tie themselves into knots in order to preserve particular legal theories. Thus this story of the legal proceedings of a billionaire who freezes himself, including actions against the doctors for homicide and his foundation for purposes of obtaining tax revenue, doesn’t seem quite as farfetched as it might. The flaw in the story is Tushnet’s ending, which takes the easy way out, although it leads directly to the punchline of an ending, which also bears some truth these days following the multiple failures of the US power grid.

“Emancipation: A Romance of the Times to Come,” Thomas M. Disch — This is one of Disch’s future stories about a building in New York called 334 (later a novel of the same name). The story is about a married couple who are having difficulties, solved by counseling and the determination that they need to have a child. But, because this is a future tale, the gender roles are very different from ours, and the way a child is born and raised is different. The early part is very disorienting, as Disch’s style in this piece has a lot of non-sequitors, both in the dialogue and the description. Then, as the couple prepares to have the baby, there’s a huge infodump. Can’t recommend it, although it definitely is a challenging story, even more appropriate today than when it first appeared.

"Nine Lives," Ursula K. Le Guin — A more traditional SF story, in that it’s about space mining and unpredictable planetology. Since it’s Le Guin that’s just the setting for the psychological and sociological examination of what it might mean to have cloning. I’m not sure I entirely buy her premise—I believe nurture has much more of an influence on the human mind than nature, so the idea that these 10 identical clones can share so much thought processes, etc., didn’t come across. But, if you give her that impossible thing, the story works, and works well, even though I could predict the plot based on the title and the very ugly nature of the planet. Luckily, it’s not the plot that’s important, but the denouement of the clone coming to terms with a new existence. On a sentence based level, there’s some choices made by Le Guin here—fragments, run-on sentences—that I’m not sure I agreed with, but I suppose famous writers can get away with these things.

“Call Me Joe,” Poul Anderson — If you get past the ludicrous idea of life on Jupiter and think of this as set in a different planet and…no, it’s still ludicrous. Okay, think of it as a fantasy. It’s a product of its time, what with the cigarette and cigar smoking on a space station, but the underlying story of the mind of a person who has a debilitating injury who can project their mind into that of a healthy body is both obvious and affecting. The psychologist Cornelius reads the tea leaves wrong initially, partly to throw the reader off the obvious, but the ending helps make this work and resolve the story well.

“The Immortals,” James E. Gunn — There’s a big infodump at the beginning as Gunn sets the scene for this story about a dystopic world where immortality can be bought and sold. A morality tale, much of this is unsurprising: the lead character is one born to privilege but not the top echelon, so trains to be a doctor in order to earn his immortality, telling himself that he’ll work on synthesizing the rare genome in order to provide it for more people. He then has his world turned upside down by removing him from his safe confines in the medical clinic to engaging in a walkabout with some “citizens,” at least one of which actively hates him. Before the end, roles get reversed, the doctor discovers something about his world and the price of immortality, and there’s a climactic battle between the forces of evil and trying-to-be-good. I shouldn’t be too harsh—this story is over half a century old and when Gunn first published it, some of these tropes may have still been new enough not to seem cliché. And, as a criticism of the capitalist control of the medical system, it’s spot on.

“The Weariest River,” Thomas N. Scortia — Many of the works about immortality harp on the idea that such a fate would be more horrible than death. This is made worse if the immortal existence is one where the body still fails even if life remains. Scortia’s picture of such a world here is akin to James Gunn’s “The Immortals,” complete with its criticism of capitalism, but Scortia goes one better by finding a cultural context between the old and immortal and the young, perhaps driven by the riots of the 60s and the flower power movement turned ugly. So much unhappiness, in a world in which all could be happy—but not under these structures.

"Day Million," Frederik Pohl — There are many stories from SF’s early days that don’t age well, but there are a few stories that get better with age, like this one. Yes, there’s some elements that reflect the time it was written, but the concept, the idea itself? So extremely relevant today. It’s not so much a story, although there’s the most basic story of the world in there, as a thought piece, a challenge, to the reader to consider the changes that have occurred in the 2000 years since the start of the Christian era, not to mention thousands of years before that, and what might change by Day Million. Just one example, Pohl begins the story by saying it’s about a boy, a girl, and a love story, then he says the boy is not a boy, since he is 187-years-old, and the girl is not a girl, because while she’s got XY chromosomes, she also has all the accoutrements we assume someone female would have. “If we find a child with an aptitude for music we give him a scholarship to Juilliard. If they found a child whose aptitudes were for being a woman, they made him one.” Pohl was one of those authors who could imagine the possibilities for change, albeit he had to set it thousands of years in the future, rather than just in the next century. Worthwhile reading.

“Watershed,” James Blish — Another morality tale, couched in a science fiction premise, but one that truly reverberates through time. Blish initially published this in 1955, before the Civil Rights Movement, but he had already foreseen what would be to come. The idea is simple: in the far future, in order to colonize planets with environments unlike the earth, humans will adapt themselves to those environments. What would the original form, then, think of all those who had thus been adapted. Blish portrays it here that the originals would have prejudices against the Adapted Man, but the last word is held by the Adapted, who reminds the Original that they are now the minority. In the global world we live in, and a country that has assimilated (sometimes forcefully, while sometimes those have been forced upon us) a wide range of people, the “standard, white” form is quickly becoming the minority. How do they react? Sadly, Blish’s story ends there, with the question. Perhaps he was an optimist and felt at that point, people would get over their prejudices. But I’m afraid it’s the opposite.

[George · Rating 4 out of 5]

The stories are well-selected, but the editor's ethical ruminations read like a dissertation that the committee has pounded to death.