Q: Why are you writing a science-fiction novel?
A: I’m having fun projecting positive and liberating effects of technology into the future.
Q: Positive? Liberating? What about the search for the gay gene?
A: There isn’t “a gay gene”. If it was that simple we would know by now. It does not take a genius to see that a person who can masturbate can engage in sex with a person of either gender, and we know that heterosexuals will engage in same-sex sex under the right circumstances, so the potential for homosexual sex probably lies in our large problem-solving brains, not in one or a few isolated genes.
Genes that prevent or reduce reproduction die out. Even if they keep being produced by mutation, they stay rare. It is possible that there are several genes that combine to make homosexuality more likely, and it is a remote possibility that there is a rare single gene that makes some people exclusively homosexual, but if they exist at all those genes will not account for all same-sex sex, so they will be hard to find.
If “gay genes” are discovered, even if they later prove bogus, there will be attempts to “cure” genetic cases of homosexuality, and some embryos will be screened for gay genes. In Miss America at the Java Kayenko, by Shayne Bell, in the June 2001 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, the queer characters escape from Earth just before being outed by gene tech. They could have been exposed by a malicious ex-lover without changing the story much, and that is generally my opinion of screening for gay genes – it is not going to change things a whole lot. Genetic screening will miss a lot of us and score hits on heterosexuals. It will be as harmful, messy and ugly as other tools of persecution, and we should oppose it – but it won’t succeed in eliminating homosexuality.
Q: If homosexuality is not genetic, why does it exist?
A: Homosexual behaviour is common enough that biologists are starting to seriously look at why it is part of the human behavioural repertoire. Although it does not result in offspring, homosexual sex can increase reproductive success by cementing beneficial same-sex alliances, as in the ancient Greek ideal male-male relationship, which did not rule out heterosexual marriage or children. Anything that increases the chances of your close relatives surviving, including solid same-sex alliances, makes sure that your genes are passed on. It may also succeed by increasing care of relatives. The brutal maths is that two nephews or nieces are the genetic equivalent of two grandchildren, or one child.
Q: So now you are saying that homosexuality is genetic, that queer genes are common because same-sex alliances have promoted the survival of relatives?
A: Homosexual behaviour is probably common because the ability to learn to enjoy a variety of sexual activities depends only on having a normal human brain. Saying homosexuality is genetic is almost as broad as saying that being human is genetic. Fundamentalists know that. They don’t want to raise children with the love that dare not speak its name, so kids suppress their homosexual urges before they recognise them. If being queer was just a rare genetic condition, suppressing it would not be necessary or effective.
Q: Given the potential for abuse, why do you say gene tech will be positive?
A: It has positive and negative aspects. We have always practised deliberate but indirect gene selection, and recently we have accidentally selected for genuinely harmful genes.
Q: What does that mean?
A: When a woman chooses a desirable sperm donor, that is indirect gene selection because the woman chooses a desirable man, not desirable genes, and the genes are selected en masse instead of one at a time. Execution and genocide are the opposite: they select against whole sets of genes. When we treat haemophiliacs so they live long enough to reproduce instead of bleeding to death at an early age, we increase the number of people who carry the haemophilia gene. That is accidental: we did not mean to increase the haemophiliac population. We already influence the genetic make-up of our species, which already presents us with moral challenges as great as gene tech. Hopefully, gene tech will force us to be more aware of what we are doing.
Q: After thousands of years of gene technology, what will sexuality look like?
A: Humanity will spread through the galaxy and split into many species, each differently altered by gene tech. Most species will opt for very long life spans. There will be hermaphroditic species with only one gender, as well as two-gendered species like ours. With gene technology allowing any degree of genetic mingling, species and sex will not mean what they used to. People will still organise families around shared DNA, but, with a little help from the lab, interspecies relationships and same-sex relationships will produce children. Sexual orientation will not be a big issue in most cultures, but how far you can get from Homo sapiens and still be human will be. People will get as fundamentalist defining humanity as they do now about queers.
Q: Pretty grandiose future for humanity, isn’t it? Supposing we destroy Earth’s ecosystems before we get off the planet?
A: That seems quite likely, but, if technology does not get mown down by war, famine or plague, then increasing technological complexity is inevitable, and that is fascinating. We are on the brink of gene technology; neuropsychology is uncovering the physical basis of thought and spiritual experience; and we are starting to get the big picture on human cultural evolution and how to manipulate that.
Look at the recent UN report on global warming: it includes various political scenarios and their effects on global climate. We are more self-aware than ever before. In the future, stable societies will be designed by social technologists, as deliberately as we now imagine designing a baby with gene tech.
Q: Social technology?
A: Asimov used the idea in his science fiction, and more recently Dawkins suggested that, since genes and ideas are both self-replicating information packages, the same principles should apply to the evolution of both. People are studying this on the Web, where most ideas are verbal and searchable. The June issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction had a story about that: The Real Thing, by Carolyn Ives Gilman. In it, a businessman becomes very powerful by understanding how to tweak ideas to make money.
Q: So why bother with a new novel?
A: Same reason anyone writes a novel – to explore what it means to be human.
Q: Are there any juicy bits?
A: Emma was grateful for the distraction. She reached for the juice. Brad’s fingers closed gently over hers, pressing her hand into the cool glass. She was feeling warm. Maybe he had the heat up, or maybe she was still blushing. Emma stared into the clear red liquid and tried to smile. “Emma.” Brad’s blue eyes looked into hers. She did not find him very alien any more. Looking up into his face felt normal, but the angle was uncomfortable. “Could we sit?” Her voice felt slow and gritty.
How to choose? The armchair alone, or the sofa, which would be an invitation for Brad to sit with her? Two deep breaths to clear her head, and she sat at one end of the sofa, crossing her legs and holding her drink in front of her. Brad poured a second glass of juice and settled in the armchair, legs comfortably apart, the way Andys always sat. Emma grinned, he had more between his legs than a woman, or a man. Even enclosed in its sheath, all that genitalia took leg crossing off his repertoire. Damn, she hated the way he was always a step ahead of her, always cool and controlled.
“Where is your autotutor?” She was not going to talk about anything personal if he had his pedantic little AI teacher on his person. Brad smiled. “I took it off.” Now he looked a little less composed. He’d always kept the tutor on his uniform when she came for dinner before. If this dinner wasn’t different, he would not have touched her hand like that, would he? Was she mistaken? Was that just a casual touch between old friends who had fought together before, and were about to do so again? She hoped not, because that would make her feel even more like an incompetent idiot.
“Try it,” said Brad. Emma took a sip. “Sour, but good,” she decided, and leaned forward to put the glass on the small table between them. So like a fish on land – she knew how she would proceed with a woman, or a man. She had no idea what to do with her feelings for Brad. “I, uh ...” Brad raised his eyebrows encouragingly.