In Other Worlds

by Margaret Atwood

  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 sex with only two of them. The quartets must consist of a Morning man and a Morning woman—who can’t have sex—and an Evening man and an Evening woman, who also can’t have sex. But the Morning man is expected to have sex with the Evening woman and also the Evening man, and the Evening woman is expected to have sex 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 sex among the slavers is a matter of raping the field hands. The chief character, an intelligence officer with the Ekumen embassy, 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 title story is constructed on an Inca base, with a splash of ancient Egypt. A man and a woman together form God. Both positions are hereditary and created by brother–sister marriage; the duties of God include divination by dancing, which causes the world to be born anew each year. Governance is carried out by God’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 spaceship. 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 God 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 passionate, 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 Homo 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, godlike 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 illustrating 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” pronounced 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. Bumbles 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 accumulation 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 title, 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 gods? 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 assemble and disassemble 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 scrapings 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 assumes 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 Homo 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 Shelley’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 competition 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 hell 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 chorea, 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 analyzed, 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 nanobot escapes, and you can’t turn the darn thing off? We might create an assembler that makes food—dirt in one end, potatoes out the other—or something that destroys bioforms hostile to us. But what if such a nanobot 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 orgasms, 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.)