Yes, I went to the library. So what? And I asked about books on genetics, but the really interesting ones weren’t true. I mean sure, there’s some interesting non-fiction on genetics for kids, but Jemima and me have Fred. And when you’ve got a magical time-travelling couch, suddenly just reading about Darwin isn’t very interesting. But the stories on genetics, that’s different. I thought I’d put some of the good ones up here, so you can see what I’m reading.
The Chysalids by John Wyndham
Wow. I wish that I had super mind powers like these kids. Imagine what I could do with it! Though you can bet if I had to run away from my stupid family ‘cos they were going to slice me up and shove me out into the bush for being special, I wouldn’t take my younger sister. Sorry Jemima, but you’re on your own. D’you think you could live in the Fringes, anyway? (That’s what they call the bush.) Although it seems like the Blasphemies (that’s the people who are special, although not all of them have cool powers – most of ‘em are just freaks with arms way too long for their bodies or too many toes or something like that) could use a bit of help ammo-wise, and while I can make it I suppose you’re quite good at shooting stuff. So we’ll see if you can come or not.
But what a horrible family! It’s bad enough living next to a mad and violent psycho, but at least he’s not in the same house as we are. David’s dad was horrible, and I’m glad they left him and the rest of his dopey friends to wallow in their own boring, silly lives. What a stupid bunch! Yeah, nuclear war is horrible (sorry, Mr. Oppenheimer, you know I love you, but it is) and I can see how it would be hard to have everything destroyed and your children and farm animals turning into freaks (like Spiderman getting bitten by a radioactive spider! – but Spiderman’s not in this, so don’t get confused) but that doesn’t mean you have to go all fundy religious whacko because of it.
I mean, I’m not too sure about God and whether he’s there or not, but if he is and you think that means you have to stone people and kill them off and burn their feet just on his say-so, well then you’re as dumb as he is. It’s not rocket science. And I’ve made some rockets, so I should know.
But I like that there’s a whole mind-power community out there, and it seems like they’re planning on killing off all the normal people eventually. There’s death everywhere in this book, it’s so cool! I suppose that that makes them as bad as the normal lot who are trying to kill off the mutant lot, but still. The mutants are so much cooler, I want them to win. If you read this book, so will you.
Genesis by Bernard Beckett
Well this is strange. It’s got a picture of an orang-utan on the cover, but really it’s about robots. And a whole lot of people with really funny names that should have died out hundreds of years ago. Apparently it’s based on this book called “The Republic”, by some old geezer in ancient Greece called Plato. At least, that’s what Dad says. He studied Ancient Greek at university and hasn’t had many jobs since. (He says if he’s got to shell out for me to go to university I have to study something useful. Like my machines aren’t useful! “There’s ALWAYS going to be war, Dad” I said. How’s that for job security?)
Anyway, there’s kind of a war in this book as well, but it’s all over by the time I read the first page. You sort of get to hear about it in flashback, though. There’s this girl, see, called Anaximander (I told you the names were stupid) and the poor thing has like a FIVE HOUR HISTORY EXAM!!!! So unfair. She’s asked a lot of questions by a load of grumpy examiners, and it’s her telling the history that’s the book, really.
It’s pretty cool. I usually don’t expect history to be good for anything, but if it was like this I’d read more of it. There’s not so much genetic engineering in this one (more robots as the next step in evolution, which I quite liked. Hard is better than squishy.) But there was this really interesting idea that things evolve to suit ideas – according to one of the robots, at least from what I can tell, ideas are like a parasite. That is, they stick to the thing that bests suits them, and the more advanced a life form is, the more good they can do the idea. Which sort of makes sense. I don’t think a monkey would be very good at understanding the physics of my trebuchet, do you? But I can understand it, and use the trebuchet to crush the monkey. Go, evolution!
It was a bit weird reading this because it seemed like the opposite of The Chrysalids. In that book, I was rooting for the new mutants to bash the boring norms into the ground, but here I wanted the boring norms to win, and they got bashed into the ground.
I’m not sure I like that.
Jurassic Park by Michael Chricton
Okay, I cheated a little bit on this, one, I admit it. Saw the movie before I read the book. There are some differences between them, but the big dinosaurs are mostly the same. I wish WE had big dinosaurs here right not. I’d like to set a Tyrannosaurus Rex on Gran, so she wouldn’t visit any more. And Jemima, when she’s being a pig. (She’d probably get stuck half-way down, ha!)
But the problems started, see, when the dinosaurs began to breed and escape – we’ll you’ve probably seen the movie, you know all this. I guess the point is that if we genetically engineer something, we can’t really tell exactly what it will do. Not until we try it, that is. Some people seem to think that because we don’t know we shouldn’t do it. That doesn’t seem very interesting to me. I’d rather do it and see what happens!
But perhaps I’d start littler than dinosaurs. After all, when something goes wrong, it should be something small that doesn’t chomp you up. So maybe the people moaning “We don’t know!” have a point after all. I still think we should give it a go, but we should be really careful about it.
And keep flamethrowers handy in case the velociraptors escape.
Escape from Genopolis by T.E. Berry-Hart
First off, you should know that you won’t get the whole story in this one – it cuts off with a cliff-hanger, and we have to wait for the next book, which isn’t out yet. And that sucks, because I was getting interested.
Genopolis is a city where everyone is sorted according to their genes. All the normal people, like you and me, are called Naturals, because no-one has been messing about with their genes. They’re all banished outside the city, and have to scrape around in nasty swamps and avoid getting killed by everyone else. Sucks to be them. Inside the city are the Citizens, who are stronger and smarter and feel no pain, and the Gemini, who are slaves – used for some fairly horrid things too, I can tell you (but I won’t, because it might spoil some of the plot points). Anyway, there are two main characters – Arlo, who is an 11 year old Citizen boy, and Usha, who is a Gemini girl of about the same age. Anyway, things turn to custard, as they so often do, and the two meet up and have to escape Genopolis (duh).
The book is really about the argument they call nature versus nurture – whether you are the way you are because of your genes or because of how you’ve been raised. See, I’m quite tall, but so are Mum and Dad, so I probably got tall genes from them (nature). But then, they’ve also fed me quite well while I’ve been growing up, and if I lived in a country where I didn’t get enough to eat, I wouldn’t grow very tall anyway (nurture). So it’s really a bit of both, I think, and it’s the same in the book. Which is quite cool. What isn’t very cool is that the Citizens don’t feel pain (they can put their hand in a fire, get burned, and still not feel it), and that the author seems to think that this means they don’t feel emotional pain as well (someone dies and they’re not too sad about it). I think that’s stupid, the two aren’t the same thing. But if you can ignore that you’ll probably like the book anyway, because parts of it are really cool.
Like the Minotaur.
Bloodline by Malcolm Rose
Okay, this is a bit creepy. I thought at first that Mr. Rose had gone a bit over the top with some of his stories, and then I saw that in the back of the book they’re actually true! Except when talking about horrible people doing horrible things, he’s given them different names. I don’t understand it – why not use their real names, so that everyone knows how bad they are?
But most of the book is about bad stuff that can happen that hasn’t happened yet. I think Mr. Rose thinks it’s going to, though. It’s about using genetic engineering to make weapons – especially weapons that can target a particular race of people. Characters in the book (the ones who make the weapons) keep saying that it will cut down on non-combatants getting hurt, but that’s just stupid. I’m a kid and even I can tell that if you lob a gene weapon at a group of people because of the colour of their skin, a lot of the people who get hit aren’t going to be people shooting weapons back at you. I don’t know if the characters were meant to be stupid or if Mr. Rose really thinks that’s a good argument, but either way it’s dumb.
Anyway, it’s starts off with people trying to do a good thing, with companies trying to find a cure for a disease called sickle cell anaemia. It’s something that’s found in a lot of black people – round Africa there’s a disease called malaria that’s really bad and spread by mosquitoes, so this gene evolved in black Africans to fight the malaria. Cool eh? But it can make them really sick as well. And this company called Yttria (in the book, not real life) is looking for a cure for the side effect sickness, and instead stumble across a way to make the cure target and kill people with the sickle cell gene. And that’s where things get really stupid, because these idiots then go and sell it to dumb racists, who do lots of nasty things with it.
It’s a shame there isn’t a way to kill off stupid people. There’s a lot of stupid people in the world – maybe they have stupid genes? (That would probably be too easy, though, wouldn’t it?) Sometimes I think it would be nice to have a genetic weapon that would only target younger sisters, but Jemima’s not all that bad really. No, I think I’ll stick with stupid, evil people. I mean, Jemima and I do some bad stuff but we never actually mean to do it.
Mr. Rose seems to be worried that people will do this in real life. I don’t know… but Dad says there’s always someone stupid enough to do anything. Usually he says it when I’ve managed to knock down the garden shed by firing cannon balls at it, but I think it’s one of those sayings that can be applied to most things.
Double Helix by Nancy Werlin
I read part of this to Jemima and she didn’t think much of the main character. His name’s Eli and he’s kind of mean and grumpy most of the time. You can feel a bit sorry for him because his Mum’s got some horrible disease called Huntington’s which some people get when their DNA makes a mistake. She’s in a mental hospital and it’s a bit sad really. The horrible thing is that if your Mum or Dad has Huntington’s there’s you could get it from them. It’s like one chance in two. But there’s a test you can do to see if you have it or not – and of course Eli doesn’t want to take it. He’d rather sulk. And yeah, I suppose I can understand that, but it must be really horrible not knowing. I mean, when I test my engines on Jemima, there’s a chance that she might get hurt, but how else do we learn?
But it turns out that Eli’s Mum and Dad knew she was sick back when they wanted to have a baby, and they went to a mad scientist (they’re everywhere in these sorts of books) to make sure that Eli had genes that didn’t carry the Huntington code. Of course, that wasn’t very legal at the time. (Couldn’t they have adopted a baby?) But no, they had to Mess With Science – but Huntington’s sounds horrible, I’d want to mess with it too.
And, as any idiot would expect, mad scientist who performs illegal experiments to make special babies doesn’t want to stop with just one improvement. And he doesn’t want to stop with just one baby…
I’m sure that makes you as shocked as it made me. Not. Why are people such idiots? Jemima and I see a mad scientist, we stop his evil schemes, we don’t go all “duh, what can I do to help?”. But then, we’re not MORONS!!!
