The Hard SF Renaissance

by David G. Hartwell

  My reasons for entertaining these particular hopes are not entirely devoid of mere idiosyncrasy and a measure of self-interest, but there’s no cause for surprise in that. “Few are those who have sought to know the future out of pure curiosity, and without moral intention or optimistic designs,” as Anatole France observed. We ought, however, to be versatile enough to try, at least occasionally, if only for fun.

  This story, the title story of one of his collections, appeared in Interzone in 1987. It is a sardonic tale of the commercial side of scientific research, a topic rarely addressed in hard SF.

  There are some names which are more difficult to wear then others. Shufflebottoms, Bastards and Pricks start life with a handicap from which they may never recover, and one can easily understand why those born into families which have innocently borne since time immemorial such surnames as Hitler and Quisling often surrender such birthrights in favor of Smith or Villanova. People who refuse to change embarrassing names are frequently forced into an attitude of defensive stubbornness, brazenly and pridefully staring out the mockery of the world. For some people, an unfortunate surname can be a challenge as well as a curse, and life for them becomes a field of conflict in which heroism requires them to acquit themselves well.

  One might be forgiven for thinking that Casanova is a less problematic name than many. It is by no means vulgar and has not the slightest genocidal connotation. It is a name that some men would be glad to have, conferring upon them as it would a mystique which they might wittily exploit. It is nevertheless a label which could be parent to a host of embarrassments and miseries, especially if worn by a gawky schoolboy in an English inner city comprehensive school, which was where the Giovanni Casanova who had been born on 14 February 1982 first became fully aware of its burdensome nature.

  Giovanni’s father, Marcantonio Casanova, had always been fond of the name, and seemed well enough equipped by fate to wear it well. He was not a tall man, but he had a handsome face and dark, flashing eyes which were definitely no handicap in the heart-melting stakes. He had made no serious attempt to live up to the name, though, accepting it as a nice joke that he found contentment in placid monogamy. His grandparents had come to Britain in the 1930s, refugees from Mussolini’s Italy, and had settled in Manchester at the height of the Depression. Marcantonio therefore came from a line of impoverished intellectuals who had been prevented by social circumstance from achieving their real potential.

  Giovanni’s mother had also had no opportunity to fulfill her intellectual potential. Her maiden name was Jenny Spencer, and she had been born into that kind of respectable working-class family which would make every effort to set its sons on the road of upward social mobility, but thought that the acme of achievement for a daughter was to be an apprentice hairdresser at sixteen, a wife at seventeen and a mother at eighteen. All of these expectations Jenny had fulfilled with casual ease.

  The whims of genetic and environmental fortune combined to give these humble parents a uniquely gifted son, for Giovanni soon showed evidence of a marvellous intelligence beyond even the latent potentialities of his parents. Nature’s generosity was, however, restricted entirely to qualities of mind; in terms of looks and physique Giovanni was a nonstarter. He was undersized, out of proportion, and had an awful complexion. A bout of measles in infancy added insult to injury by leaving his eyesight terribly impaired; astigmatism and chronic myopia combined to force him to wear spectacles which robbed his dark eyes of any opportunity they ever had to flash heart-meltingly, and made him look rather cross-eyed. His voice was high-pitched, and never broke properly when he belatedly reached puberty. His hair insisted on growing into an appalling black tangle, and he began to go thin on top when he was barely seventeen. As dozens of thoughtless people were to remark to his face, and thousands more were to think silently to themselves, he certainly didn’t look like a Casanova.

  The class culture of England had proved remarkably resilient in the face of the erodent egalitarianism of the twentieth century, and bourgeois morality never did filter down to the poorer streets of Northern England, even when the old slums were demolished and new ones erected with indoor toilets and inbuilt social alienation. Where Giovanni spent his formative years very few girls preserved their virginity past the age of fourteen, and many a boy without a CSE to his name had done sufficient research to write a Ph.D. thesis on sexual technique by the time he was old enough to vote. This tide of covert sexual activity, however, passed Giovanni Casanova by. He was acutely conscious of the flood of eroticism which seethed all around him, and wished devoutly to be carried away by it, but to no avail.

  Other ugly boys, who seemed to him as unprepossessing as himself, managed one by one to leap the first and most difficult hurdle, and subsequently gained marvellously in confidence and expertise, but Giovanni could not emulate them. His unattractiveness made things difficult, and his name added just sufficiently to his difficulties to make his task impossible, because it made even the girls who might have felt sorry for him laugh at him instead. Even the most feeble-minded of teenage girls could appreciate that there was something essentially rib-tickling about saying “no” to a Casanova.

  Giovanni had started out on his journey through adolescence bogged down by self-consciousness, and by the time he was seventeen he was filled with self-loathing and incipient paranoia. By then he was already doomed to a long career as a social misfit. He was so withdrawn, having suffered such agonies from his failures, that he had completely given up talking to members of the female sex, except when forced by absolute necessity.

  His sanity was saved, though, because he found a haven of retreat: the world of scientific knowledge, whose certainties contrasted so sharply with the treacherous vicissitudes of the social world. Even his teachers thought of him as a slightly unsavory freak, but they recognized that in intellectual terms he was a potential superstar. He compiled the most impressive scholarly record that his very moderate school had ever produced, and in October 2000 he went triumphantly to university to study biochemistry.

  Biochemistry was the glamor science in those days, when every year that passed produced new biotechnological miracles from the laboratories of the genetic engineers. Giovanni was entranced by the infinite possibilities of the applied science, and set out to master the crafts of gene-mapping, protein design and plasmid construction. In everyday life he seemed extremely clumsy and slow of wit, but he was a very different character in the privacy of a laboratory, when he could manage the most delicate operation with absolute control, and where he had such a perfect intuition and understanding of what he was doing that he soon left his educators far behind.

  In the new environment of the university, where intelligence was held in reasonably high esteem by female students, Giovanni tried tentatively to come out of his shell. He began talking to girls again, albeit with ponderous caution and unease. He helped other students with their work, and tried once or twice to move on from assistance to seduction. There was a black-haired Isabel who seemed to think him an interesting conversationalist, and a freckled Mary who even cooked a couple of meals for him because she thought he was neglecting himself, but they politely declined to enter into more intimate relationships with him. They could not think of him in such a light, and though they were prepared to consider Giovanni a friend of sorts, the boys they welcomed into their beds were of a very different type. Giovanni tried hard not to resent this, and to see their point of view. He certainly did not blame them, but his sympathy with their attitude only made him more disappointed with himself, and even more sharply aware of the mockery in his name.

  Transforming bacteria by plasmid engineering was passé long before Giovanni’s graduation, and he felt that the engineering of plants, though it certainly offered great opportunities for ingenuity and creativity, was not quite adventurous enough for him. He knew that his talents were sufficiently extraordinary to require something a little more daring, and so he channelled his efforts in the direction of animal engineerin
g. His doctoral research was devoted to the development of artificial cytogene systems which could be transplanted into animal cells without requiring disruption of the nucleus or incorporation into the chromosomal system; these made it practicable to transform specific cells in the tissues of mature metazoans, avoiding all the practical and ethical problems which still surrounded work on zygotes and embryos.

  Giovanni’s early ambition was to apply this research to various projects in medical science. He produced in his imagination half a dozen strategies for conquering cancer, and a few exotic methods of combating the effects of aging. Had he stayed in pure research, based in a university, this was undoubtedly what he would have done, but the early years of the new millennium were a period of economic boom, when big biotechnology companies were headhunting talent with a rare ruthlessness. Giovanni never applied for a job or made any inquiry about industrial opportunities, but found potential employers begging to interview him in the comfort of his own home or any other place he cared to name. They sent beautiful and impeccably-manicured personnel officers to woo him with their tutored smiles and their talk of six-figure salaries. One or two were so desperate to net him that they seemed almost willing to bribe him with sexual favors, but they always stopped short of this ultimate tactic, much to his chagrin.

  He was so fiercely dedicated to his work, and had such noble ideals, that he hesitated for a long time before selling out, but the temptations were too much for him in the end. He sold himself to the highest bidder—Cytotech, Inc.—and joined the brain drain to sunny California, being careful to leave most of his bank accounts in convenient European tax shelters so that he could be a millionaire before he was thirty. He had the impression that even the most ill-favored of millionaires could easily play the part of a Casanova, and he could hardly wait to set himself up as a big spender.

  Cytotech was heavily involved in medical research, but its dynamic company president, Marmaduke Melmoth, had different plans for this most extraordinary of hirelings. He invited Giovanni to his mansion in Beverly Hills, and gave him the most fabulous meal that the young man had ever seen. Then he told Giovanni where, in his terminology, “the game was to be played.”

  “The future,” said Melmoth, sipping his pink champagne, “is in aphrodisiacs. Cancer cures we can only sell to people with cancer. Life-expectation is great, but it isn’t worth a damn unless people can enjoy extended life. To hell with better mousetraps—what this world wants is better beaver-traps. You make me a red-hot pheromone, and I’ll make you a billionaire.”

  Giovanni explained to Melmoth that there could be no such thing as a powerful human pheromone. Many insects, he pointed out, perceive their environment almost entirely in olfactory terms, so that it makes sense for female insects with limited periods of fertility to signal their readiness with a smelly secretion which—if produced in sufficient quantities—could draw every male insect from miles around. Humans, by contrast, make very little use of their sense of smell, and their females are unafflicted by short and vital phases of fertility which must at all costs be exploited for the continued survival of the species.

  “All this I know,” Melmoth assured him. “And the fact that you thought to tell me about it reveals to me that you have an attitude problem. Let me give you some advice, son. It’s easy to find people who’ll tell me what isn’t possible and can’t be done. For that I can hire morons. I hire geniuses to say ‘If that won’t work, what will?’ Do you get my drift?”

  Giovanni was genuinely impressed by this observation, though it could hardly be reckoned original. He realized that his remarks really had been symptomatic of an attitude problem, which had manifested itself all-too-powerfully in his personal life. He went to his laboratory determined to produce for Mr. Melmoth something that would stand in for the impossible pheromone, and determined to produce for himself some sexual encounters that would put him on course for a career as an authentic Casanova. It was simply, he decided, a matter of strategy and determination.

  In fact, Giovanni was now in a position where he had more than a little prestige and influence. Although he was notionally starting at the bottom at Cytotech, there was no doubting that he would go far—that he was a man to be respected no matter how unlovely his appearance might be.

  Thus advantaged, he had little difficulty in losing his virginity at last, with a seventeen-year-old blonde lab assistant called Helen. This was a great relief, but he was all too well aware of the fact that it represented no considerable triumph. It was a fumbling affair, throughout which he was trembling with anxiety and embarrassment; he felt that his everyday clumsiness and awkwardness, though he could leave them behind in his laboratory work, were concentrated to grotesque extremes in his sexual technique. Pretty Helen, who was not herself overburdened with experience or sophistication, uttered not a word of complaint and made no reference to his surname, but Giovanni found himself quite convinced that in the privacy of her thoughts she was crying out “Casanova! Casanova!” and laughing hysterically at the irony of it. He dared not ask her to his bed again, and tended to shun her in the workplace.

  Deciding that he needed more practice, Giovanni arranged visits to whores whose telephone numbers he found scrawled on the walls of the pay phones in the main lobby, and though he avoided by this means the embarrassment of knowing that his partners knew his name, he still found it appallingly difficult to improve his performance. If anything, he thought, he was getting worse instead of better, becoming steadily more ludicrous in his own eyes.

  Clearly this was what Melmoth would have called an attitude problem, but Giovanni now knew that simply calling it by that name would no more solve it than calling him Casanova had made him into an avatar of his famous namesake. Self-disgust made him give up visiting prostitutes after his third such experience, and he could not bring himself to try to resuscitate his relationship with Helen. He had little difficulty convincing himself that celibacy was to be preferred to continual humiliation.

  In his work, however, he was making great strides. Taking Melmoth’s advice to heart, he asked himself what would constitute, in human terms, an alternative to pheromones. The dominant human sense is sight, so the nearest human analogue of an insect pheronome is an attractive appearance, but this has so long been taken for granted that it sustains a vast cosmetics industry dedicated to helping members of the desired sex to enhance their charms. Giovanni felt that there was relatively little scope in this area for his expertise, so he turned his attention instead to the sense of touch.

  He eventually decided that what was needed was something that would make the touch of the would-be seducer irresistible to the target of his (or her) affections: a love-potion of the fingertips. If he could find a psychotropic protein which could be absorbed quickly through the skin, so that the touch of the donor could become associated with subsequent waves of pleasurable sensation, then it should be fairly easy to achieve an operant conditioning of the desired one.

  Giovanni brought all his artistry in protein-design to bear on the production of a psychotropic which would call forth strong feelings of euphoria, tenderness, affection and lust. This was not easy—understanding of this kind of psychochemistry was then at a very primitive level—but he was the man for the job. Having found the ideal protein, he then encoded it in the DNA of an artificial cytogene which was tailored for incorporation in subepidermal cells, whose activation would be triggered by sexual arousal. The protein itself could then be delivered to the surface of the skin via the sweat glands.

  When the time came to explain this ingenious mechanism to Marmaduke Melmoth, the company president was not immediately enthused.

  “Hell’s bells, boy,” he said. “Why not just put the stuff in bottles and let people smear it on their fingers?”

  Giovanni explained that his new psychotropic protein, like the vast majority of such entities, was so awesomely delicate that it could not be kept in solution, and would rapidly denature outside the protective environment of a living cell. I
n any case, the whole point was that the object of desire could only obtain this particular fix from the touch of the would-be seducer. If it was to be used for conditioning, then its sources must be very carefully limited. This was not a technology for mass distribution, but something for the favored few, who must use it with the utmost discretion.

  “Oh shit,” said Melmoth, in disgust. “How are we going to make billions out of a product like that?”

  Giovanni suggested that he sell it only to the very rich at an exorbitant price.

  “If we’re going to do it that way,” Melmoth told him, “we’re going to have to be absolutely sure that it works, and that there’s not the ghost of an unfortunate side-effect. You work for customers like that, they have to get satisfaction.”

  Giovanni agreed that this was a vital necessity. He set up a series of exhaustive and highly secret clinical trials, and did not tell Melmoth that he had already started exploring the effects and potentials of the tissue-transformation. In the great tradition of scientific self-sacrifice, he had volunteered to be his own guinea pig.

  To say that the method worked would be a feeble understatement. Giovanni found that he only had to look at an attractive girl, and conjure up in his imagination fantasies of sexual communion, to produce the special sweat that put magic at his fingertips. Once he was sufficiently worked up, the merest touch sufficed to set the psychochemical seduction in train, and it required only the simplest strategy to achieve the required conditioning. Girls learned very quickly—albeit subconsciously—to associate his touch with the most tender and exciting emotions. They quickly overcame their natural revulsion and began to think that although not conventionally attractive he was really rather fascinating.

  Within three weeks of the experiment’s launch four female lab assistants, two word-processing operatives, three receptionists, one industrial relations consultant and a traffic warden were deep in the throes of infatuation. Giovanni was on top of the world, and gloried in the victory of becoming a self-made Casanova. The dignity of celibacy was cast casually aside. Women were desperate now to get him into bed, and he obliged them with pleasure. He even managed to overcome some of the limitations of his awkwardness, and was soon troubled no more by premature ejaculation.