Adaptation and Emortality: Human Enhancement in Tales of the Biotech Revolution

Abstract

Before 1980, futuristic fiction made little use of speculative biotechnologies as a potential means of human enhancement, and the most famous early-20th century novel anticipating the widespread future application of biotechnologies, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (Huxley, 1932), was a vitriolic satire that viewed the prospect of technological interference with human nature as implicitly horrific. Although most of the speculative motifs featured in that text were appropriated from an essay whose tone was resolutely optimistic, J.B.S. Haldane’s Daedalus; or, Science and the Future (Haldane, 1923), it is notable that other direct fictional extrapolations of the same essay were anxiously negative in tone. These included those by Haldane’s friend Julian Huxley (Aldous Huxley’s brother), ‘The tissue-culture king’ (Huxley, 1926), and Haldane’s sister, Naomi Mitchison, Solution Three (Mitchison, 1975) and Not by Bread Alone (Mitchison, 1983). Although use of biotechnological themes in futuristic fiction increased markedly after 1980, the general tone of such fiction remained hostile, often hysterically so.