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January 12, 2007
Steyn on what's Next
Mark Steyn reviews the latest thriller from Michael Crichton, Next, his cutting-edge, day-after-tommorow look at a future that is all-too-possible.
Steyn sums up the novelist/physician/scientist's unique talent in the opening of his review.
He has a remarkable instinct not just for novelizing the hot topic du jour but for pushing it on to the next stage, across the thin line that separates today's headlines from tomorrow's brave new world.
He's especially good at the convergence of the mighty currents of the time -- the intersection of the technological, legal, political and cultural forces in society and the way wily opportunists can hop and skip from one lily pad to another until something that would once have sounded insane is now routine.
[...]
The best Crichton novels are like the DNA double helix -- strands of science and media, genius and huckstering that twist in and out of each other.
The new novel posits a future where DNA-manipulating researchers are able to create life -- ranging from talking animals to replacement body parts in petri dishes -- along with ethical questions that threaten to overwhelm society (and the reader, too).
Crichton offers a press release between chapters from MIT, after scientists succeed in growing a human ear, subtly improved over the original, to be offered for sale.
MIT scientists have grown a human ear in tissue culture for the first time . . . The extra ear could be considered "a partial life form -- partly constructed and partly grown." The ear fits comfortably in the palm of the hand . . .
Several hearing-aid companies have opened talks with MIT about licensing their ear-making technology. According to geneticist Zack Rabi, "As the American population ages, many senior citizens may prefer to grow slightly enlarged, genetically modified ears, rather than rely on hearing-aid technology." A spokesman for Audion, the hearing-aid company, noted, "We're not talking about Dumbo ears. Just a small increase of 20 per cent in pinna size would double auditory efficiency. We think the market for enhanced ears is huge. When lots of people have them, no one will notice anymore. We believe big ears will become the new standard, like silicon breast implants."
Which, of course, is all too likely. Picture Florida circa 2015, a gated community full of big-eared nonagenarians.
I like the way Crichton's thriller brings us the usual low characters with the usual low motives -- sleazy men with the hots for unfeasibly breasted babes. But, in doing so, he reminds you how easily we accept what would once have seemed downright creepy: cities full of women with concrete embonpoints that bear no relation to the rest of their bodies.
As one character says, he knows they're fake and they don't feel right but it turns him on anyway.
If you can accept, in effect, a technological transformation of something as central as sexual arousal, why would you have any scruples about what technology can do for the human body in far more peripheral areas? By the time an accused pederast is advised by his lawyers to claim his need for transgressive sexual encounters is due to his having the "novelty gene," you begin to appreciate the horrors that lie ahead: for tactical advantage here and there, we're likely to wind up surrendering strategically the essence of humanity.
Who knew that fake hooters heralded such profound questions about our species?
Not bad for a man declaimed by high-falutin' literary critics as a hack producer of pulp-fiction.
Posted by Mike Lief at January 12, 2007 07:31 AM
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