Google made a very cool interactive Doodle to celebrate Jules Verne’s birthday yesterday, you could move around in your own personal Google-shaped submarine. As a canonical science fiction author, Verne explored the highest reaches and deepest depths of the imagined world.
This got me to thinking about the science fiction genre, and what it has explored in terms of fertility. It called to mind novels that focus on sexuality and fertility like Anthony Burgess’ The Wanting Seed, Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale, and P.D. James’ The Children of Men, and similarities cropped up for me again and again in every such novel. They are all dystopian, failing future societies under strict control and usually lacking in food and shelter for the majority of its citizens. Why? Is it that when we think of fertility and man-made attempts to control or shape it, in our most celebrated and most cautionary imaginations, we foresee a bleak future?
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I haven’t read the aforementioned novels, but I have read Huxley’s Brave New World. Does that make me qualified to comment.
I think humans tend to crave stability and predictability, and any world where humans were completely in control would be stable and predictable to the point of utter boredom. We don’t like things that deviate from the norm, but the monkey wrenches that life throws at you are what make it beautiful and worth living.
I’m trying to type this out with a six-month old sitting on my lap. We had thought that we were done are family, and had no intention of having another, but threw caution to the wind after drinking a bottle of wine, and , lo and behold, here we are! We would have never tried for her, or planned her, but this beautiful little monkey wrench turned out to be EXACTLY what our family needed.