Medically and genetically engineered dystopias

Science fiction is an especially creative kind of science writing, one that can show us the present in imaginative and emotionally charged ways while also anticipating possible futures. Amidst hopeful talk of scientific and technological progress, science fiction can also reveal injustices, risks, and dystopian futures to correct or avoid.

On the other hand, some might argue that we don't really need to resort to fiction or even creativity, because we've actually been living in a true-life sci-fi dystopia for a long time already, one filled with nonfiction stories that are factually frightening enough—particularly when it comes to the technoscientific hijacking of human health, or worse, the enabling of discriminatory horrors by some groups of humans against others.

This month, we workshopped and discussed texts that took us across this entire range of fact and fiction, while sometimes deliberately interrogating the line between the two—all of which gave us a lot of dystopianism past, present, and future to ponder.

An already medically-engineered present

For starters, we workshopped the draft script for a podcast interview with Allen Frances, professor emeritus and former chair of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Duke University School of Medicine. In the early 1990s, Frances headed the task force that produced the fourth edition of the famous/infamous Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the "DSM"). But a decade ago Frances started speaking out against the very system he had helped pioneer. Frances became especially critical of the role of the pharmaceutical industry in engineering the subsequent expansion of the DSM, and the attendant overmedicalization of mental health. In 2014, Frances published a book that became an international bestseller: Saving Normal: An Insider's Revolt against Out-of-Control Psychiatric Diagnosis, DSM-5, Big Pharma, and the Medicalization of Ordinary Life. Frances might say that he's revolting against a medically-engineered dystopia that we're already living within today. His critics might say that he's blocking progress.

Genetically-engineered fables of the past and future

Rebellion against real dystopias backed by bad technoscience isn't new. Five hundred years of racism and slavery, enabled by scientific claims and terrible technology, has been answered over the years by slave revolts, abolitionist and civil rights movements, and recent—and, no doubt, future—uprisings. On this topic, the text we delved into next was a hybrid essay combining nonfiction and fiction, titled "Racial Fictions, Biological Facts: Expanding the Sociological Imagination through Speculative Methods" by Ruha Benjamin, a sociologist of science and technology and professor of African American Studies at Princeton University.

One of Benjamin's goals with this text is to force us to question what we mean by progress:

Why is it that we can imagine growing cardiac cells in a lab, but not growing empathy for other human beings in our everyday lives? For many people, the idea that we can defy politics as usual and channel human ingenuity toward more cooperative and inclusive forms of social organization is utterly farfetched. Thus I am convinced that we must query this faith in biological regeneration that stands alongside an underdeveloped investment in social transformation. If our bodies can regenerate, why do we perceive our body politic as so utterly fixed?

Although Benjamin is an academic researcher, in this text she chooses to experiment with creative science-fiction narrative. In a brief introduction she explains her choice:

In this moment of social crisis, where even the most basic assertion that black lives matter is contested, we are drowning in "the facts" of inequality and injustice. Whether it is a new study on criminal justice disparities or another video of police brutality, demanding empirical evidence of systematic wrongdoing can have a kind of perverse quality—as if subjugated people must petition again and again for admission into the category of "human," for which empathy is rationed and applications are routinely denied.

In this context, novel fictions that reimagine and rework all that is taken for granted about the current structure of the social world— alternatives to capitalism, racism, and patriarchy—are urgently needed. Fictions, in this sense, are not falsehoods but refashionings through which analysts experiment with different scenarios, trajectories, and reversals, elaborating new values and testing different possibilities for creating more just and equitable societies. Such fictions are not meant to convince others of what is, but to expand our own visions of what is possible.

What follows is an action-packed sci-fi short story that begins:

It is 2064. A reparations initiative that allows victims of police brutality to regenerate organs is well underway. A major new component of the initiative will be unveiled for the fiftieth anniversary of the Ferguson uprising, but the largest biobank in the country has been repeatedly hit by raiders intent on selling stem cells on the white market. ...

Keep reading here.

Could the future bring back the past?

Benjamin's approach was a useful setup for the other draft text we workshopped this month. Where Benjamin used science fiction to extend her social-science scholarship, NeuWrite Nordic advisory board member Howy Jacobs, professor of biology at Tampere University, took the even more radical step of drafting a mini science-fiction story to serve as a commentary column in a scientific journal.

Like Benjamin, Jacobs delivers an action-packed narrative that resonates with current events, but unlike Benjamin, Jacobs throws his audience straight into the story without even an explanatory introduction:

As we wait anxiously for the results of the presidential election, fears are growing that America may descend into full‐scale civil war. ... It's ironic that the catalyst for the country's disintegration arose not from America's many home‐grown schisms, but from the actions of a malign foreign dictator. The recreation of the Neanderthals by genome editing began, seemingly, as a vanity project of North Korea's late ruler, Kim Ai‐Won, aided by several maverick scientists. However, in a scenario that deviated from, rather than replicated, Mary Shelley's classic 19th‐century novel [Frankenstein], the "creatures" turned out not to be boorish, muscle‐bound monsters devoid of moral impulse. Instead, they are highly intelligent, emotionally refined and infinitely resourceful. It is believed that their creator had hoped to unleash upon the world, or at least upon his American foes, a master race of merciless savages enslaved to his will. But, on the contrary, the Neanderthals have elicited the basest emotions and most bestial instincts of the species that historically supplanted them. Their mere existence has led to the brutalization of American society and its fragmentation into mutually hostile clans ...

Keep reading here.

We came away inspired from this workshop by the possibilities for creative writing—whether factual podcast conversations, hybrid essays, or science-fiction stories—to engage audiences in the aspects of technology and science that are hardest to talk about. One might even conclude that tearing down disciplinary walls could make the world a better place.

—Trevor Corson

Bonus

Watch Ruha Benjamin's TED talk: "Is technology our savior—or our slayer?"