Authors of speculative fiction have long pondered the making and marketing of tools that could re-engineer future human generations. Fortunately for those of us wishing to enrich our collective consideration of this troubling prospect, they are still mulling over its many implications. Also fortunately, they are now being joined by some of the finest writers and thinkers working in other genres. The mini-reviews here represent a sampling of recent works focused on the technologies and ideologies that could push us into a "post-human" era.

Nonfiction

Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age, Bill McKibben (2003)

Regular readers of Genetic Crossroads are already aware of Bill McKibben's landmark Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age. McKibben's project is an exploration of the ways in which species-altering technologies might reshape not just individuals and social arrangements, but also the meaning and experience of being human. Enough is essential reading. Happily, it is every bit as thought-provoking and "summer-readable" as the best of the fiction works on our list. (For more on Enough, see http://www.genetics-and-society.org/mckibben.)

The Future of Human Nature, Jurgen Habermas (2003)

The core preoccupations of The Future of Human Nature by Jurgen Habermas are similar to those of Enough, though of course in a much more theoretical register. Habermas is often identified as the most influential philosopher and social thinker in Germany today; his erudite attention to "the biopolitical future prophesied by liberal eugenicists" and the meaning of genetic manipulation "for our self-understanding as moral beings" is understood there as a significant political intervention. The Future of Human Nature was released in the US in April, and so far seems to have attracted surprisingly little attention here even among progressive intellectuals. Perhaps that will change as those inclined to critical social theory encounter Habermas' slim volume, take to heart his urgent call for broader public discourse about the human biotechnologies, and rise to his challenge: "Philosophers no longer have any good reasons for leaving such a dispute to biologists and engineers intoxicated by science fiction."

Fiction

Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood (2003)

Margaret Atwood is one of the outstanding literary talents of our time. Her new novel, Oryx and Crake, begins shortly after a catastrophe triggered by a combination of genetic manipulation, climate change, corporate excess, and popular complacency. Jimmy, who may be the sole survivor of a global pandemic caused by a biotech marketing scheme gone awry, shares the ruined landscape with the Crakers, a tribe of human-like folk from whom impulses to hierarchy, competition, territoriality, and sex out of season have been genetically eliminated.

As this partial synopsis hints, Atwood's political sensibilities are piercing and caustic. Their effect is simultaneously heightened and relieved by her hilariously florid linguistic inventions: Young elites in pre-collapse gated communities play Extinctathon and Kwiktime Osama, while their parents labor at biotech companies called OrganInc and Helth Wyzer making wolvogs, pigoons, and other lucrative transgenics. Atwood's anthropological imagination is both droll and provocative: Her story begins with Jimmy literally coming down from the trees; as it ends, we are left to wonder whether and where humanity will pull through. Will it be through Jimmy's discovery of a handful of other human survivors? Or as an evolutionary development of the Crakers' tentative dabbling in art and religion?

Critical reaction to Oryx and Crake has been strangely polarized. Lisa Appignanesi expresses what seems to be the majority view (and mine) when she writes in The Independent (UK) that "Oryx and Crake is Atwood at her best-dark, dry, scabrously witty, yet moving and studded with flashes of pure poetry."

That a couple reviewers sharply disagree with this assessment is not in itself remarkable. But it may be significant that these critics seem reluctant to contemplate the future that Atwood extrapolates. Thus Deborah Blum (MinneapolisStar-Tribune) complains that Oryx and Crake "is preachy, and its apocalyptic catastrophe is unbelievable" and Michiko Kakutani (New York Times) calls it "didactic, at times intriguing but in the end thoroughly unpersuasive."

On the other hand, Atwood's chilling futurology is unreservedly appreciated by The Economist: "The scary thing is that this latest book seems less contrived, less invented than [The Handmaid's Tale]." Ronald Wright uses nearly the same phrase in the Times Literary Supplement: "The truly frightening thing about Atwood's dystopia is that so little of it is far-fetched." Wright's one quibble with the book serves also as a telling comment on our collective predicament: "If Oryx and Crake has a failing," he writes, "it is that too little is left to the reader's imagination, but this is also a strength: most of our troubles as a culture stem from failure to imagine the worst." (For links to these and other reviews, see http://www.reviewsofbooks.com/oryx_and_crake/.)

Feed, M. T. Anderson (2002)

Babies are gestated and born in conceptaria, in part because ambient radiation levels have made the old-fashioned way too risky. Cyborgian adolescents spend their time accessorizing the mysterious lesions that everyone is suddenly sprouting. One of the teenagers, Link, is a clone produced from the dried blood on Mary Todd Lincoln's dress.

But reprogenetics and environmental collapse are, in a sense, just background details. The teen protagonists--like everyone else in the world of Feed--literally have computer chips where their brains should be. Their implants bombard them nonstop with individually tailored commercial incitements, rendering them almost incapable of utterances beyond an instant-messaging / Valley-speak pidgin. ("Omigod! Like big thanks to everyone for not telling me that my lesion is like meg completely spreading.")

Feed pits frenetic technology-enhanced consumerism and heartless corporate logic against a few very ragged remnants of human caring. The outcome, as in several of the other books on this list, is uncertain.

M. T. Anderson's novel is ominous, tender, and savagely funny. It is categorized as "young adult" literature, but is also suitable for adults mature enough to contemplate the possible futures of today's teenagers.

The Secret, Eva Hoffman (2001)

The Secret is a beautifully rendered literary speculation about reproductive cloning: about the new puzzles it would splice onto venerable existential quandaries about human agency and identity; about the unfamiliar twists it would bring to enduring emotional issues about family secrets and the proper limits of parental control. A first novel by an acclaimed British author of memoir and history, The Secret combines coming-of-age story and cautionary tale.

Iris is a teenager when she discovers that she is her mother's clone. Her first reactions clearly echo the ordinary angst of adolescent struggles for autonomy, and clearly depart from them: "I was a replica, an artificial mechanism, a manufactured thing. I was unnatural. My sense of myself as a young girl with her very own, unique self-an illusion. My feelings, my precious feelings-an illusion. A sleight of hand. I was nothing more than a Xerox of her cellular matter, an offprint of her genetic code."

In a later scene, Iris confronts the scientist who cloned her. He is at first smugly proud of his handiwork--"I'd say you're practically perfect"--and then baffled by her accusations. "[W]e had lots of discussions," he tells her defensively. "Lots of American-style talk. We had ethics panels, with the best experts. We followed all their recommendations."

The exchange soon becomes openly hostile. It ends with the cloner playing the cards that he believes trump all--cards that will be familiar to those following the ongoing debates about human genetic manipulation. "I am a scientist…I can't hold back change," he asserts. And in any case, the cloning procedure was "what your mother wanted." Iris' mother, he says, gave her informed consent, and she is the party with standing in the matter. "She was my customer, not you."

Beggars in Spain (1994), Beggars Ride (1996), Beggars and Choosers (1997), Nancy Kress

Nancy Kress' Beggars trilogy begins with a designer-baby experiment. The good news is that the child surpasses the design specs laid out by her corporate mogul father: She not only needs no sleep, but is hyper-intelligent and practically immortal as well. Unfortunately, the fertility doctor has made one small mistake. Somehow he has implanted a second embryo--undesired and unenhanced--into the womb of the uneasy but submissive mother.

The relationship between the decidedly non-identical twin sisters provides an intimate launching point for this "hard sci-fi" epic that spans several hundred years and more than a thousand pages. Kress' story moves from discrimination and mob violence against the Sleepless, to the machinations of the next-generation (or rather, new-release) SuperSleepless, to a nuclear exchange between the now radically divided human subspecies, to an almost-happy ending in which altruistically motivated genetic enhancement gives the normals the ability to photosynthesize.

Kress is well attuned to the dire social and political risks of human genetic enhancement. And she is clearly aware of--and often unabashedly didactic about--the divergent political values and visions in play. Her plot is driven, and at times bogged down, by the irresolvable conflict between radical libertarianism and a commitment to human solidarity.

At the end of it all, Kress seems unable to make up her own mind about either the political theory or the technological path she prefers. But she raises key questions about the possible social consequences of future human redesign. She also poses an urgent challenge that too many of us manage to dodge: What do we make of the fact that human beings today live in biologically distinct realities? (Think life span, infant mortality, access to clean water, caloric intake.) What are the responsibilities of "choosers" when social structures and power arrangements consign billions to be "beggars?" Will we dismantle the walls that enforce those divisions, or head toward a world in which they're inscribed in our genes?