Word: huxleys
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Hubble's astronomical triumphs earned him worldwide scientific honors and made him the toast of Hollywood during the 1930s and 1940s--the confidant of Aldous Huxley and a friend to Charlie Chaplin, Helen Hayes and William Randolph Hearst. Yet nobody (except perhaps Hubble) could have imagined such a future when the 23-year-old Oxford graduate began his first job, in New Albany...
When science fiction gets over its trite romance with the parts catalog, it can achieve unnerving power. Aldous Huxley and George Orwell are the classic exemplars of that small, elite class of science-fiction writers who frighten and annoy science-fiction devotees. Huxley's Brave New World (1932) bursts with prescient speculation: "feelie" multimedia, Prozac-like "soma" tranquilizers, test-tube babies. Late in life Huxley became a psychedelics guru, seduced by the potent allure of brain chemistry...
...Huxley and Orwell, of course, didn't think of themselves as science-fiction writers. The true artists of the genre are a tribe apart. Many created "future histories" that are worked out in exquisite detail. Robert A. Heinlein, for instance, was a hugely popular SF writer but of a surprisingly gloomy and gothic cast. His prediction for the late 20th century was summed up briskly: "Considerable technical advance during this period, accompanied by a gradual deterioration of mores, orientation and social institutions, terminating in mass psychosis." It was hard to watch the Clinton impeachment trial without feeling...
Ever since publication of Huxley's dystopian novel, this has been the standard eugenics nightmare: government social engineers subverting individual reproductive choice for the sake of an eerie social efficiency. But as the age of genetic engineering dawns, the more plausible nightmare is roughly the opposite: that a laissez-faire eugenics will emerge from the free choices of millions of parents. Indeed, the only way to avoid Huxleyesque social stratification may be for the government to get into the eugenics business...
...Huxley's scenario made sense back in 1932. Some American states were forcibly sterilizing the "feebleminded," and Hitler had praised these policies in Mein Kampf. But the biotech revolution that Huxley dimly foresaw has turned the logic of eugenics inside out. It lets parents choose genetic traits, whether by selective abortion, selective reimplanting of eggs fertilized in vitro or--in perhaps just a few years--injecting genes into fertilized eggs. In Huxley's day eugenics happened only by government mandate; now it will take government mandate--a ban on genetic tinkering--to prevent...