Has the field of genetic research surprised you with what it’s found during that time? Your story was written over twenty years ago, and covers a generation in and of itself. Well, it is a kind of nightmare for the protagonist, who has lost control of the technology that made his fortune, but maybe not for everyone else. New Internationalist’s editorial collective liked everything about the story except the ending, which they truncated to make it seem more nightmarish than it actually is. Ballard’s condensed novels and Bruce Sterling’s “Twenty Evocations,” and strung as many ideas as I could on to the rise and fall of a corporate drone in the biohacking trade. I had already been thinking about genetic engineering (I’d just written a biohacking story, “The Invisible Country,” for Lew Shiner’s anthology When The Music’s Over), and there’s nothing like a constraint or two to get the imagination working. They gave me a list of topics they wanted me to cover, and a limit of 2000 words. New Internationalist, a British, left-leaning, anti-corporate, pro-environment magazine, got in touch and asked me to write a story about the perils and horrors of genetic engineering. Andrews University) and a youngish would-be hot-shot SF writer. Hi Paul, first off, thanks for talking with us about your story in this month’s issue, “Gene Wars.” What inspired it?Īt the time, I was a working biologist (I’d just started my first and last permanent job, as a lecturer at St.

Series: The Tales of Gorlen Vizenfirthe.Series: From the Lost Travelers’ Tour Guide.People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction!.

Fairyland by Paul McAuley