Survivor’s Log 023: Altered Offspring, or, “The Children Are The Future But I’m Not Happy About It”
Survivor’s Log 023: Altered Offspring, or, “The Children Are The Future But I’m Not Happy About It”
A good number of books in our specific genre think about what the future holds when humanity is all but totally wiped out. Through a new environment, a mutation or genetic engineering, the generation that is going to inherit the earth is markedly quite different causing anxiety, usually in our hero, about what is being lost.
Almost all science fiction (including speculative fiction) can be considered social commentary related to its time, and when we see the children of the future trope pop up in end-of-the-world stories, it’s no different. The author is using the mechanic of focusing on future generations to show what we might lose if we carry on as we are. Children bear the burden of our responsibility and the impact of our actions (or lack thereof). If you don’t like what they are doing, it’s your fault. Greta Thunberg I’m sure would agree.
Let’s look at three books where we’re introduced to some altered offspring.
Margaret Atwood - Oryx and Crake
Liz Jensen - The Uninvited
George R Stewart - Earth Abides
!!!Spoilers ahead!!!
The new generation introduced by Atwood in Oryx and Crake are called Crakers; a fact we learn from our human narrator and possible sole-survivor of a biochemical extinction event, Snowman. It is only later on that we discover that these beings were genetically created by the same man who engineered the disease which wiped out almost all human life. What’s different about Crakers vs humans? Well, first up they are blue in appearance and never wear clothes. They have very specific sexual practices which include a lot more group sex, that is seemingly consensual. Atwood presents Crakers as a worst case scenario of what can go wrong when bio-engineering goes too far. That said, the Crakers are quite gentle in comparison to the human violence that occurs throughout, so perhaps Atwood is also optimistically nihilistic about the whole idea. I certainly read it that way.
The Crakers are a new form of other. They don’t seem to have ranges of emotions which exclude them from love, except in the form of blind obedience. As the creation of a man with a giant ego who’s one third of a love triangle, you can see why he might be tempted to engineer in some of those traits of loyalty and naivety.
Moving on to the new school of kids in Liz Jensen’s The Uninvited. She narrowly makes my list since there is an element of the supernatural at work here since these kids are both preternaturally here and also from some other future time. That’s the excuse they give for murdering their elder family members in cold blood. This happens as a sort of mass-extinction trend that is clearly beyond a viral video telling youngsters to eat tide pods. By the end our protagonist SPOILERS discovers that we have so badly damaged our planet that this generation is coming back via telepathic connection with today’s kids (somehow?) to stop it from happening. Hence all the killing. Probably quite justified when you consider the data on climate change and what we’re not doing about it. Anyway, these murderous others are painted differently from Atwood’s, right on the other end of the spectrum. They are violent beings forced into shitty actions because of our generation’s shitty decisions. Not engineered into homogeny by our technophilic future fetishes. Either way, we’re not coming out good so far.
Finally, anxiety about offspring is arguably the central theme of George R Stewart’s Earth Abides. I have a real fondness for this book and its preoccupation with running water. After the annihilation of most of the human race through a pandemic, our survivor protagonist Isherwood Williams is concerned about the disappearance of culture and learning, of engineering and science. He has to come to terms with the fact that his kids and their kids will be better versed in how to kill mountain lions with spears than with mathematical concepts. In fact basic skills are something he has had to instil into his tribe himself in order that they can survive in the new wasteland and not scavenge.
By the time he is an old man, he can barely recognise the language of his altered offspring, and there’s a bit of a suggestion that they are all inbred too. Which they likely would be in a group of survivors that small. Stewart uses the lens of future generations to highlight current progress and the miracle of the mundane that we have today (or his today in 1949). Those that come after the fall will not have it so good.
What do you think? Have you read any books that have this obsession with post-collapse future generations? Comment below, and thanks for reading.
KJP
