But laws, too, undergo punctuated evolution: periods of inertia are followed by periods of quick change. In the United States, it was still illegal to alter human embryos. It was not illegal to develop gene therapies—genetic changes inserted into the human cells of children and adults via viral vectors—that could combat gene-caused diseases like cystic fibrosis and hemophilia.
“And also combat what the organization in the Caymans did,” George said. They were hypermasculine at the moment: flannel shirt, jeans, work boots, mustache. Was the mustache fake? I had no idea.
Jen said, “Kenly doesn’t have a disease.”
“There’s a gene therapy being tested at Berkeley that is adaptable to the kids’ conditions. The vector to deliver the new genes is delivered by liposomes, which is safer than using a virus. The researchers there are eager to see if it works. And Kathleen got a compassionate use exception to full FDA trials.”
Jen said, “They want to experiment on these kids!”
I said, “Compassionate use exceptions are for people who are dying.”
“Then Kathleen got an exception to the exception,” George said im-patiently. “She has a lot of influence. Guys, this is a way to reverse what was done to Kenly.”
“An untested way!” Jen said. “Kenly is not some lab rat!”
George said, “It’s not completely untested, and not just on animals. One parent already had it done on their four-year-old, and he’s fine.”
I said, “I want to talk to that parent.”
“You can’t. Anonymity was part of his deal. The press is going to get this story soon, and nobody wants their child splashed all over the internet. Also, although I don’t have confirmation of this, my sources say the FBI is close to indictments, which may stop the Berkeley group from proceeding with their experiment. You need to decide now.”
Jen said, “Don’t pressure us!”
I put a hand on her arm. Unlike me, Jen is not used to getting clients, witnesses, and juries to cooperate. I said, “George, don’t think we’re not grateful to you for all you’ve done. You and Kathleen. A chance to reverse what was done to Kenly is more than we expected. You’ve done a phenomenal investigative job. It’s just a lot to take in, and we need a little time.”
“Don’t pull your lawyer tricks on me,” George said, but they smiled. “You don’t have a lot of time. Here’s the home phone number on an encrypted line for the lead scientists at Berkeley. She says call anytime as long as it’s soon—she wants your decision. I gotta go see some other people.”
After they left, Jen said, “No. We can manage without some experiment on Kenly. Don’t you know the history of scientists experimenting on people? Tuskegee with syphilis, Crownsville with drilling into brains, Sloan-Kettering with cancer cells injected into—”
“Stop. I know. I’ve done the same research you have. We have to talk this out completely, Jen. From the beginning, every small detail.”
“Don’t you dare treat me like you’re taking a deposition!”
I apologized. Jen apologized. Then we sat in our living room, close together on the couch, and talked as a sliver of moon rose beyond the window, no bigger than a child’s fingernail. Moonlight glinted on the edges of our wineglasses like sunshine on Kenly’s tiny mirrors.
The treatment was experimental.
Risk taking was part of altruism, and two of the altered children had already died taking risks.
Genes were complicated things, and you don’t just charge in and alter them without the risk—that again!—of turning on or off other genes. When Kenly finished the therapy, would she still be Kenly?
Would she still want to help people, to give selflessly? There was so much selfishness in the world. I saw it every day in divorce cases. I saw it on the news, whole countries risking nuclear annihilation to get what they wanted, when they wanted it. Corporations repealing environmental and safety laws to maximize their own profits. And against them, good and generous people who valued fairness, who sacrificed personal safety to save drowning strangers, take on Ebola in distant jungles, deliver food to starving people who shoot them for it. I wasn’t naive; these same people could probably be selfish in other contexts. But they were good people.
The scientists in the Caymans probably also thought of themselves as good people, as did whatever billionaire philanthropists were funding them. They were creating and scattering seeds of heightened altruism. Enough seeds would survive to pass on that altruism, aided by the biological mechanics of a gene drive, to eventually swing humanity toward greater concern for each other, for their societies, for the future. It might be a small and scattered planting, but it was a planting and, in time, might spread like kudzu. The scientists were growing goodness.
Was I going to make my daughter less good because she might become too good? She might do something generous for her entire society. Or she might just become one of the everyday altruists, the volunteers at nursing homes, builders for Habitats for Humanity, neighbors you can count on to help without expecting anything in return. The true invisible, indispensable people.
After we made our decision, we went upstairs to gaze at the kids. Brady lay sprawled in his crib, one arm flung around his favorite blankie. Kenly lay straight in the bed like a miniature soldier. “This scene is such a cliché,” Jen said, and gave a single sob.
After she went to bed, I stayed up, drinking a bottle of Scotch somebody gave us last Christmas, which had sat unopened in the back of the pantry. The crescent moon left the window and clouds moved in. Eventually it began to rain, a soft pattering against the pane. I opened the window to smell the spring.
2:00 a.m. That was 11:00 p.m. in California, not too late. The lead scientist, whoever she was, wanted our decision.
I picked up my cell to make the call.
2
Profile: Nancy Kress
Lisa Yaszek
Nancy Kress (b. 1948) is a U.S. author of science fiction and fantasy celebrated for her ability to tell large-scale stories about the technocultural transformation of humanity through the focusing lens of interpersonal and familial relationships. Born Nancy Anne Koningisor in Buffalo, New York, she was raised in the nearby town of East Aurora in a large Italian American family. She obtained her undergraduate degree in elementary education from State University of New York at Plattsburgh, then went on to teach fourth grade for four years. In 1973 she moved to Rochester to marry Michael Joseph Kress, with whom she had two sons, Kevin Michel Kress and Brian Stephen Kress.
Although the adolescent and twentysomething Kress did not imagine that she would someday become a writer, she was always drawn to stories of other places and times. As a child, she read nineteenth-century girls’ author Louisa May Alcott and twentieth-century Western writer Zane Gray. In elementary school, she was bored by C. S. Lewis but fascinated by the collections of fairy tales that were designated as appropriate reading for girls. She discovered science fiction at the age of fifteen when she came across a copy of Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End; a few years later, the work of Ursula K. Le Guin captured her imagination as well. Even as she immersed herself in what would eventually become her chosen genre, Kress continued to engage other modes of writing and thinking. In her twenties, she grew interested in Objectivist Ayn Rand, but eventually rejected her philosophy because it celebrated an ethic of personal responsibility at the expense of community and care for others.
Kress’s diverse literary interests have always been reflected in her career as an author. She began writing in the 1970s as a stay-at-home mother looking for something to occupy her time while she was pregnant with her second son. Kress sold her first story, “The Earth Dwellers,” to Galaxy magazine in 1976. By the mid-1980s she was publishing regularly in major science fiction venues including Omni, the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, and she had earned her first Nebula Award for the 1985 short story, “Out of All Them Bright Stars.” This period also saw the publication of Kress’s first three novels: th
e fantasies Prince of the Morning Bells (1981), The Golden Grove (1984), and The White Pipes (1985). These books pay homage to Kress’s interest in both fairy tales and feminist speculative fiction by casting all kinds of women—young and old, rich and poor, often with children in tow—as the “sheroes” of their own lifelong adventures.
After acquiring two more degrees (an MS in Education in 1977 and an MA in English in 1979, both from SUNY Brockport), divorcing her first husband in 1984, and starting work as a corporate copywriter and part-time English instructor, Kress published her first short story collection, Trinity and Other Stories (1985), and her first two science fiction novels, An Alien Light (1988) and Brain Rose (1990). These works combined Kress’s already established expertise at character development with the thematic question that would guide much of her later fiction: can new technologies that transform human bodies and minds also transform human nature? In 1990 Kress became a full-time writer and began to consolidate her reputation for weaving ethical debates about the meaning and value of new scientific and medical trends into vividly dramatized stories. This is particularly evident in the Hugo and Nebula award–winning novella “Beggars in Spain” (1991), which uses genetic engineering as the occasion for two strong, stubborn, and brilliant women to test the merits of an Ayn Rand–like Objectivism against an Ursula K. Le Guin–inspired communitarianism.
In a move that would come to characterize much of her later science fiction writing, Kress developed “Beggars” into a novel and then a future-history trilogy to more carefully explore the impact of genetic and social engineering on subsequent generations of her protagonists’ intertwined families. Genetic engineering and quirky characters in complex relationships are also at the heart of Kress’s technothrillers, Oaths and Miracles (1996) and Stinger (1998). These stories revolve around a neurotic FBI agent whose obsession with his ex-wife compromises his career, but who redeems himself by teaming up with a series of remarkable women to solve crimes of genetic engineering that threaten the world.
The publication of the Probability sequence (1996–2002) and the Crossfire diptych (2003–2004) cemented Kress’s reputation as a leading author of hard science fiction. Like much of her previous work, these series feature families whose lives are radically transformed by new technoscientific situations. In both new series, however, Kress exchanges the near-future Earth locales of her earlier future histories for the far-future alien settings characteristic of the interplanetary romance. She also makes genetic engineering and other sciences (most notably, anthropology and physics) increasingly central to her stories. This latter shift seems to have been spurred by both scientific developments including the mapping of the human genome and personal ones such as Kress’s 1998 marriage to scientist and science fiction author Charles Sheffield, who died in 2002 from brain cancer.
Over the past decade and half, Kress has continued to win accolades for her science fiction stories including Steal Across the Sky (2009), Before the Fall, During the Fall, and After the Fall (2012), and the Yesterday’s Kin series (2014–2018). She has also continued to publish technothrillers (including the 2008 disaster tale Dogs) and female-oriented fairy tales (in the form of two original stories in Anna Kashina’s 2012 anthology, Once Upon a Curse). In this period, Kress has made a name for herself in young adult science fiction as well, with regular contributions to Dreaming Robot Press’s Young Explorers Adventure Guide series under her own name and with the publication of the Soulvine Moore Chronicles, a fantasy series written under the penname Anna Kendall. She has published six short story collections in English and one in French; the latter, Danses aériennes, earned Kress a 2018 Grand Prix de l’imaginaire award.
To date, Kress has authored thirty-three books, including three books on writing. Her work has won six Nebulas, two Hugos, a Sturgeon, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and has been translated into two dozen languages, including Klingon. She has also been a regular contributor to Writer’s Digest (for which she wrote the “Fiction” column for sixteen years) and a teacher for writing workshops in the United States, Germany, and Japan. She currently co-hosts Taos Toolbox, an intensive writing workshop she teaches each summer with Walter Jon Williams. Kress lives in Seattle with her husband Jack Skillingstead, whom she married in 2011, and Cosette, the world’s most spoiled toy poodle.
An Interview with Nancy Kress
LY: You’re often celebrated for stories that link big technoscientific ideas with intimate portraits of families and relationships. Have your own family experiences factored into your writing?
NK: I think everything plays a part in my journey. Everything that you see or read or experience or view on television or movies, everything goes into that deep well of unconsciousness and sort of mutates down there into, hopefully, something rich and strange.I write a lot about the relationships among sisters. I have a sister to whom I’m very close. I also have two brothers, whom I love, but I’m not as close to them. So yes, I would say my family did play into it. But it also played into it in another way. I grew up in the 1950s, and they were a much different time for women. When I was twelve, my mother sat me down and said, “Do you want to be a nurse, a secretary, or a teacher?” That was literally the entire scope of what she, with her working-class, Italian American background, could imagine for women. . . . So I thought it over and I said, “I’ll be an elementary school teacher,” and that’s what I became. I think one’s family background always plays into the larger life path that you take. I came to writing science fiction pretty late—[I was] almost thirty—and that was part of the reason.
LY: The 1950s was an exciting time in terms of scientific and technological development. Did that interest you as a young person, and did it ever even cross your mind that you might grow up to write about such issues?
NK: It never crossed my mind, and I was not interested. It is sort of amazing to me in retrospect. Again, this may have gone [along] with something of the science-is-for-boys-not-girls period. But I was an English major in college, and in graduate school, and it was always the narrative that interested me. . . . My first three novels were fantasy. And then several novels after that were science fiction, but not hard science fiction. They didn’t use actual science, they only used it as metaphor and as background, in the way that a lot of science fiction does. I was, I would say, at least in my forties, before I became interested in genuine science. What caused my interest was genetic engineering, and then everything else followed from that. Physics is still something I don’t feel as confident of as I do biology, even though I read about it.
LY: Given how central relationships and families are to your fiction, it seems significant that you tend to write about sciences that change exactly those things.
NK: Science gives birth to technology, and technology gives birth to societal change. And it’s the societal change, especially ethical aspects of that, that interests me. The science itself is fascinating. But unless I can translate it into narrative, and its effect on people, it doesn’t hold as much fascination, and it doesn’t, of course, create stories. Because stories are made out of and for people.
LY: Who are the models for your families in science fiction? Do you draw on your own family, or other families, real or imagined?
NK: Very seldom my own, except possibly my sister. I guess, like everyone else who was an English major, I read all the time, and observed people, and tried to come to conclusions about them, and as I got out in the world more, was shocked by some of the families I saw. And I think all of that feeds into it.
LY: Do you have any favorite fictional families?
NK: Yes. The late Ursula K. Le Guin, who is my all-time favorite science fiction writer, said quite early on that there were not enough children in science fiction. She said this when she was writing The Dispossessed, which I think is one of the best science fiction novels ever written. And that struck me as really strongly true. Because much science fiction includes whizzing around the galaxy, doing whatever it is you’re doing, or
inventing marvelous things, but there are no children in that. It’s hard to imagine anybody in William Gibson’s world actually mixing orange juice for school, and packing a school lunch, and dealing with measles shots, what have you. . . . I didn’t want to do that. I wanted—I have two children of my own, and I was a teacher of elementary school children, and I wanted to write the kind of things that focused on families, often, not always but often, with children.
LY: You’ve also talked about Arthur C. Clarke as an early influence. What interested you about his writing?
NK: It was the big ideas, and also the strong strain of lyrical romanticism that goes through Clarke. The first science fiction novel I ever read was Childhood’s End. And, of course, there is a family in there. The two children . . . become the vanguard of the next stage of human evolution. That impressed me enormously. That book has everything in it. It has individual characters, it has families, it has the whole entire human race transforming. And then Clark destroys the whole planet at the end. Aliens—it’s all there. And as an introduction to science fiction it was pretty damn amazing.
But the lyricism, the romance lyricism that goes through a lot of the short stories, like “The Star” and “The Sentinel”—there’s that yearning for what’s out there, at the same time understanding that what’s out there may not necessarily be benign.
LY: A lot of your early reading was outside the realm of science fiction, as in the case of Louisa May Alcott. I would love to hear more about why you liked about Alcott and maybe who your favorite March sister was, although I bet I can guess—everyone has the same favorite.
NK: Jo was everybody’s favorite March sister. I also liked Meg. I liked her domes-ticity. I have a strong streak of domesticity myself. And I liked her desire for a husband and children, which Jo never had. And I did like her. I thought Beth was sort of wimpy, and it wasn’t until I was much, much older that I could appreciate Amy, and her struggle to be a great artist, and her realization that she never was going to be and having to make peace with that. But I was much, much older before I was able to appreciate Amy. . . .
Entanglements Page 4