Mutating women

>> Technolife 2020 is a creepy vision of the near-future
by JULIET WATERS

Five years ago, Anna Quindlen wrote that there were three stages in the life span of women: pre-Babe, Babe and post-Babe. Recently, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd revised this idea. “Now there are four: pre-Babe, Babe, Botox Babe and Cher.”

After reading Technolife 2020: A Day in the World of Tomorrow it seems inevitable that more stages are on the horizon. But what seems even scarier is a day when there might not be any stages at all.

Imagine a world where embryos are “germlined.” Parents can add genes, along with their own, so that a child would resemble them, but would also have the optimal chances of growing up to be a Hollywood celebrity. A daughter could just skip the whole Babe thing and just start at pre-Cher. In this world you might even be able to clone your favourite goldfish with a bonus Cher gene. Cher-fish might not qualify as a stage of womanhood, but by that point there might not really be such a thing as “woman” anyway. In the world author Lois Gresh creates, doctors are experimenting with an enzyme that will simply retard the aging of cells. With regular injections of telemorase, an enzyme that was actually discovered in 1998, a girl could conceivably remain 14 for the rest of her life.

has much darker reasons than vanity for staying young: she was born with a host of genetic diseases that can only be evaded if she stays a teenager. Thus, she’s become a lab rat to an evil geneticist. Even more depressing is that before she became ill, when she was trying to survive on the streets, Sherry had donated a bunch of eggs to a fertility clinic.

Our “hero,” Joe Leinster, buys one of these eggs, inseminates it with his own sperm and plants it in a surrogate mother. By 2020 it’s fairly routine for men to become single fathers this way. This would probably seem more heroic if Joe hasn’t specifically chosen a daughter genetically enhanced to make her look like a supermodel. Fortunately, he’s not the kind of guy that would abuse his daughter. Unfortunately, he’s the kind of guy who sublimates his lonely frustration by becoming sexually addicted to his pet fish—albeit a highly intelligent “biomimetric” fish that is programmed to seduce him.

Technolife 2020 is a weird, creepy little book. In many ways it feels as mutated as its characters. It starts off almost as a sci-fi sit-com: Joe’s daughter, Caroline, doesn’t respect him—she’s appalled by his sexual desperation, his affair with a fish, and his attempt to find companionship through a dating service called Hot Mary’s Hookup Hooch. It lurches into drama as con woman Hot Mary tries to claim she is Caroline’s biological mother. Finally it disintegrates into depressing tragedy as we discover that Caroline’s fate is much like Sherry’s. It’s like watching Seinfeld morph into The X-Files.

Gresh adds about 70 pages of essays explaining the trends she predicts in her novella. Her ideas are provocative, but it’s sometimes hard to take her seriously as a journalist, especially when she writes something like: “According to the New York Times, we already know the genetic foundations of 90 per cent of all breast cancers. I find this fact hard to believe, but I never doubt what I read in the New York Times.”

Still, with all its flaws, Technolife does force one to ponder a future that’s becoming increasingly difficult to think about. The days when advances in technology simply meant less work seem very far behind us. Now we’re looking at a generation who may have to face the possibility of eternal life as whoever their parents think they should be. Is there really a fate much worse than that? :

Technolife 2020 by Lois Gresh. ECW press, pb, 207pp, $15.95