by Zeke Teflon, author of Free Radicals: A Novel of Utopia and Dystopia
The Science in George Turner‘s Science Fiction Novels
Beloved Son (1978): Turner’s apprehensions about genetic alteration of food crops are, unfortunately, still very relevant. There are already problems because of it, one example being that the only really effective natural “insecticide,” bacillus thuringensis, has in great part lost its effectiveness because its genes have been introduced into a host of cash crops, and so insects have been afforded opportunity to develop resistance to it. With monomaniacally profit-driven seed and pesticide companies engaging in wholesale genetic manipulation of food crops, Turner’s Beloved Son is an apt forerunner of Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Wind Up Girl (2009).
Vaneglory (1981)/Yesterday’s Men (1983): Turner’s positing of a small minority of near-immortals already among us is implausible for a number of reasons, such as radiation damage and consequent cell-reproduction errors. Another is that vastly increased lifespan and perpetual youth would be a huge reproductive advantage, and one would expect the genes responsible to spread, not be restricted to a tiny minority. This concept belongs in vampire fantasies, not science fiction.
Drowning Towers (1987): Turner did his homework on climate change, and some of the predictions in Drowning Towers are already being borne out. He did, though, rather dramatically overstate the amount of sea level rise that will take place by the middle of this century, according to current climate models. Other than that, he was right on.
Brain Child (1991): Turner’s speculation about the possible results of genetic manipulation of human embryos is still relevant. A friend who’s a retired geneticist, and who worked for decades at a major research institution, read the book recently and says that, overall, Turner’s speculations are still plausible.
The Destiny Makers (1993): Turner’s speculations about genetically modified disease organisms are all too plausible. If there’s an apocalypse any time soon, such organisms will quite possibly be the cause.
Genetic Soldier (1994)/Down There in Darkness (1999): The type of human genome manipulation described in both books is plausible. It’s so crazy, though, that it would have been considered hare brained by eugenics enthusiasts in the heyday of phrenology. (Of course, as Turner describes it, it’s the product of a religious cult, which makes it plausible–nothing is too insane for religious fanatics.)
The “morphogenetic fields” conjecture that underlies Genetic Soldier is another matter. Rupert Sheldrake, a former PhD biochemist at Cambridge Universtiy, came up with the idea in the 1970s/early 1980s, and published his first book on the matter, A New Science of Life, in 1981. The basic concept is that ideas and consciousness exist independently of brains, be they human or animal; instead they exist in “morphogenetic fields”–whatever they are–and that information can be shared because of those “fields.” This is more than a bit like insisting that the information in a computer’s random access memory (volatilve memory, not its hard disk) continues to exist in a “cybergenetic field”–whatever that is–after you turn off the computer, and that it can be shared via those “fields” with other computers without physical transmission.
The other problems with this idea (which Sheldrake is still flogging on the lecture circuit) are that Sheldrake relies upon uncontrolled studies in his books, that when other scientists have replicated his experiments they’ve failed to replicate his results, and that Sheldrake’s theory is “unfalsifiable.” Followers have argued that skeptics get negative results because they “dampen” “morphogenetic fields”; thus both positive and negative experimental results can be (and are) cited as being in alignment with the “theory,” making it “unfalsifiable.”
It’s also worth noting that Sheldrake cites that old New Age talisman, quantum physics, as justification for his conjecture. Biochemists are not known for their fine grasp of quantum mechanics, and it’s very probable that Sheldrake and, especially, his New Age followers have as little understanding of quantum physics as I do–approximately the understanding that a hog has of algebra. (The difference is that I’m honest about it. They’re not, and they make claims citing as justification an extremely complicated theory they don’t even remotely understand.)
This was already common knowledge in scientific/skeptical circles when Turner wrote Genetic Soldier, yet he chose to base the book upon this already debunked “theory.”
As for more general scientific/technological matters, Turner didn’t seem to have an especially good grasp of either science or technology. He didn’t have an inkling of the coming of the Internet, nor of what near-instantaneous communication would mean for society. Of course, very few other sci-fi authors of the time did, either; the only two exceptions that come immediately to mind are John Brunner (Shockwave Rider, 1975) and William Gibson (Neuromancer, 1984).
There are also a few bits of scientific inaccuracy that surface from time to time in Turner’s novels, including our old friend from 1950s sci-fi, food pills, which make two brief appearances in Genetic Soldier, and, in the same book, a starship orbiting the Earth, well above the atmosphere, leaving a trail visible to those on the ground.
But, Turner shouldn’t be judged too harshly for his scientific inaccuracies. He obviously took the time to inform himself about the most important scientific matters (climate change and genetic manipulation), and his books still serve as timely warnings about human meddling with nature.
The Political, Social, and Economic Concepts in George Turner’s Science Fiction Novels
There are three central social socio-political-economic assumptions in George Turner’s sci-fin novels. One is that advanced society can’t exist without coercive authority. The second is that human beings will continue to reproduce willy nilly in all social conditions. Turner has Nick, one of the narrators, state this quite directly in Drowning Towers. The third is that there’s so little wealth to go around that it would make essentially no difference if it were more fairly distributed. Again, Turner makes this assumption explicit in Drowning Towers. (It’s always risky to extrapolate a novelist’s views from statements his characters make, but I strongly suspect that Turner wouldn’t have had his characters expound on these beliefs in book after book if he didn’t hold them.) A fourth, much less important assumption is that conventional religions will wither away over the coming decades, leaving only fringe cults.
Turner full well realized the hopelessly corrupt and corrupting nature of capitalism and government, but he could see no way out. He could see no alternative to them, and says so openly in the opening pages of The Destiny Makers, where policeman Harry Ostrov, the protagonist, remarks that socialism, communism, and anarchism have all been tried and found wanting. This largely accounts for the dark tone of Turner’s novels, because he saw the evils of capitalism and government, yet could see no viable alternatives.
But Turner is overly pessimistic. In the case of communism, the only varieties of it ever attempted on a mass scale were under the auspices of dictatorial states, which gave lip service to the concept, but in practice had distinct privileged classes that wielded power (the party, the government apparatus–what Milovan Djilas termed “the new class”), and dispossessed, nearly powerless masses. As Emma Goldman put the matter in My Disillusionment in Russia: “True Communism was never attempted in Russia, unless one considers thirty-three categories of pay, different food rations, privileges to some and indifference to the great mass as Communism.”
As for socialism, what most people think of when they hear the word is the socioeconomic systems of the Scandanavian countries. This is not socialism. More accurately, it’s welfare-state capitalism, in which corporations and economic elites continue to control society, but in which some of the damage caused by capitalism (hunger, homelessness, lack of opportunity, etc.) are papered over by reformist measures.
The other common variety of “socialism” is endemic to the third world, and is characterized by corrupt authoritarian regimes imposing it in top-down manner. To the limited extent that socialism has succeeded in these countries (overall, it hasn’t), it’s succeeded due to decentralization and democratic local control. (For further discussion, see African Anarchism: The History of a Movement and Venezuela: Revolution as Spectacle.)
As for anarchism, by all accounts it was successful during the only time it was tried on a mass scale for a period of years, in Catalonia and other regions of eastern and southern Spain during the Spanish Civil War. It was eventually crushed by the forces of Stalinism, Nazism, and Fascism, but during its existence it was viable as a socio-economic system. (For further information, see Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell, Collectives in the Spanish Revolution, by Gaston Leval, and The Anarchist Collectives, by Sam Dolgoff.)
Interestingly, the one place in Turner’s sci-fi novels where he describes a functional, though small-scale, alternative political/social system–among the “genetics” in Genetic Soldier–that system is based upon distinctly anarchist concepts and practices: decentralization, lack of a central coercive authority (i.e., government), voluntary cooperation, and mutual aid. That Turner didn’t see these as attributes of anarchism doesn’t negate the fact that they are.
Turner’s Malthusian belief that human beings will mindlessly reproduce no matter what their circumstances is simply wrong, as Turner should have known. The evidence disproving this bleak assumption was already available when Turner wrote Drowning Towers (published in 1987).
For instance, in the article “Fertility in Transition,” in the Spring 1986 issue of World Focus (journal of the American Geographical Society), James L. Newman traced the causes of the decades-long decline in fertility in the European countries. He concluded that there were three reasons for a decline in the birth rate. One was industrialization: “Out of it came the public health discoveries that reduced mortality, followed by a new lifestyle which no longer necessitated large families. . . . Whereas on farms and in cottage industries children contributed their labor to the family enterprise, in the city they became consumers. Only a few offspring could be afforded if the family was to maintain or . . . improve its standard of living.” The second reason for the decline in fertility, according to Newman, was birth control. It “was the answer to these new social and economic realities.” And the third element in lowering the birth rate was the relative emancipation of women–the greater the status and freedom of women, the lower the birth rate. (A corollary of this, of course, is that patriarchal religions which demean women contribute to population growth–just look at the birth rate among Mormons.) If Turner had done even minimal research in this area, he should have known all of this.
Turner’s third bleak socio-economic assumption, that there’s simply not enough wealth to go around and that the wealth and privileges of the rich make little difference to the lives of the poor, is also simply wrong. Australia (the setting for all of Turner’s novels) and the U.S. are similar in terms of living standards and per capita wealth. And the very unequal distribution of wealth in the U.S. is approaching that depicted in Drowning Towers. In 2013, the U.S. population was approximately 316 million and total net worth was approximately $66 trillion, with the top 1% owning 35% of net worth (and 42% of financial–non-home–worth), the next 4% owning another 28%, and the bottom 95% of the population owning 37% of net worth, with almost all of it concentrated toward the top. This situation is even worse than it appears, because the bottom 40% of the population, approximately 125 million people, have “negative net worth”–in other words, their debts exceed their assets.
Crunch the numbers (divide total net worth by population) and you end up with average net worth of over $208,000–which is what iindividual net worth would be if wealth were divided equally.
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So much for Turner’s assumption that there’s not enough to go around and that a more equitable distribution of wealth would make little difference to those on the bottom.
Ultimately, Turner’s faulty social, political, and economic assumptions boxed him in. They made it impossible for him to even conceive of constructive solutions to the ecological and scientific/technological problems he so well describes. But describe them he did–beautifully and memorably. That’s a major achievement.
The one place where Turner was overly optimistic is in his assumption that conventional religions will wither away over the next few decades, even under the horrendous conditions he describes, leaving only fringe groups. Religion normally thrives in conditions of poverty, illiteracy, and hopelessness–just look at the American South, since the 19th century the poorest, least literate, and most religious part of the country. The same holds in the Muslim world — its poorest and least literate parts, such as Afghanistan, tend to be the most religious. So there’s no reason to think religion would have mostly withered away in the horrible conditions Turner describes in his novels. But this is a relatively minor matter.
As for the rise of murderous cults, Turner was on the money. In 1995, the year after publication of Genetic Soldier, in which Turner describes in some detail a cult biological attack on the entire world, the Aum Shinrikiyo cult attacked the Tokyo subway system with Sarin nerve gas. When they busted the cult following the attack, Japanese authorities discovered that the cultists had also been trying to manufacture biological weapons. More recently, it appears that Muslim fanatics were responsible for the Sarin attack in Damascus in 2013. One shudders to think what religious fanatics are cooking up in clandestine labs today.
A Final Note
All of George Turner’s science fiction novels are beautifully written, and the best of them are masterpieces that serve as still-pertinent warnings about the dangers of climate change and genetic experimentation.
Turner’s best novels are Brain Child and Drowning Towers. Both are easy to find in used bookstores. Check ‘em out.
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Zeke Teflon is the author of Free Radicals: A Novel of Utopia and Dystopia.
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- Climate change: The hottest thing in science fiction (grist.org)
- Scientific delusions, or delusions about science? Rupert Sheldrake’s ten dogmas (part one) (heterodoxology.com)
