The Golden Fleece

This collection of stories about possible future developments in biotechnology juxtaposes the ultra-large scale of "Mortimer Gray's History of Death," which encapsulates several thousand years of human history, both past and future, with the intimate scale of "Next to Godliness," in which a dinner party goes wrong, in a fashion obliquely connected to the psychotropic drug-patches worn by all the guests. Among the other tales are "Some like it Hot" which deals with possible approaches, both biological and psychological, to the prospect of global warming; while the previously-unpublished novella "The Golden Fleece" offers a comparative study of the scientific and artistic responses to a natural ability to perceive more shades of color than most people can. All the stories work at the interface between biological possibility and philosophical potential. First-rate SF speculation by a master storyteller.

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The Golden Fleece

Tales of the Biotech Revolution

Brian Stableford

No copyright 
 2012 by MadMaxAU eBooks

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CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

THE GOLDEN FLEECE

SOME LIKE IT HOT

ALFONSO THE WISE

NEXT TO GODLINESS

MORTIMER GRAY’S HISTORY OF DEATH

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INTRODUCTION

This is the seventh collection of shorter “Tales of the Biotech Revolution” that I have published, the others being:
Sexual Chemistry
(Simon & Schuster UK, 1991),
Designer Genes
(Five Star, 2004),
The Cure for Love
(Borgo Press, 2007),
The Tree of Life
(Borgo Press, 2007),
In the Flesh
(Borgo Press, 2009) and
The Great Chain of Being
(Borgo Press, 2010). There have also been eleven novels of the same ilk:
Inherit the Earth
(Tor, 1998),
Architects of Emortality
(Tor, 1999),
The Fountains of Youth
(Tor, 2000),
The Cassandra Complex
(Tor, 2001),
Dark Ararat
(Tor, 2002),
The Omega Expedition
(Tor, 2002),
The Dragon Man
(Borgo Press, 2009),
The Undead
(Borgo Press, 2010; in a double volume with the novella
Les Fleurs du Mal), Xeno’s Paradox
(Borgo Press, 2011),
Zombies Don’t Cry
(Borgo Press, 2011) and
Nature s Shift
(Borgo Press, 2011). Many, but by no means all, of the stories in the series share a common future-historical background, an early version of which was first sketched out in a futurology book,
The Third Millennium: A History of the World 2000-3000,
written in collaboration with David Langford in 1983 and published by Knopf and Sidgwick & Jackson in 1985.

The train of thought transporting the stories has, therefore, now been running for more than a quarter of a century, and the dates attached to some of the earlier stories have already elapsed without any sign of the possibilities sketched therein materializing (the one obvious exception being the advent of Viagra, anticipated, although not under that brand name, in the story variously known as “Sexual Chemistry” and “A Career in Sexual Chemistry”). Although such dates are, in essence, arbitrary, progress in practical biotechnology has, indeed, been a trifle slower than I anticipated in 1985, and it now seems highly unlikely that its products will be able to make the kind of impact on the current phase of the unfolding ecocatastrophe that I once hoped it might. It is, of course, the general fate of possibilities that only a tiny minority ever come to fruition, but there are still grounds for hope (no matter how slim) that constructive biotechnology might eventually have a role to play in recovery from the Crash whose inevitability all the stories in the series anticipate, so I am not yet ready to consign the entre sequence to the rubbish heap of optimistic moonshine.

This collection includes the story that maps out the first revised version of the
Third Millennium
future history in the greatest detail, “Mortimer Gray’s History of Death,” the first version of which was drafted in April 1987. That version did not sell, and I revised it in 1994, increasing the wordage from 19,000 to 26,000, mostly by fleshing out the first and last chapters, which thus became a frame narrative of sorts. The revised version was published in the April 1995 issue of
Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine.
I subsequently expanded the story again in 1999, into the novel
The Fountains of Youth,
fleshing out all the chapters concerning the protagonist’s own biography, thus altering the balance of the story very markedly, obliterating what little remained of the careful symmetry of the original version. Had the original version survived I might have been tempted to reprint it here instead of the published novella, but I no longer have a copy of it. The
Asimov’s
version is probably the most widely-read of the stories in the series, being included in Gardner Dozois’
Best of the Year
collection and then in his
Best of the Best
sampler, but I thought it worth reprinting anyway, if only for the sake of completeness.

“Alfonso the Wise” was first published under the pseudonym Francis Amery in
Interzone
105 (March 1996); it was one of two ultra-short stories that the editor asked me to produce in order to pad out the contents list of the issue in question, which was dominated by a very long novella (much longer than the various novellas of mine that the editor in question had previous rejected on the grounds that they were too long). It is admittedly trivial, but, again, I thought it worth reprinting on the grounds of completeness.

An abridged version of “Next to Godliness” was published in an anthology edited by Ian Whates, entitled
Celebration
(2008) and published by Newcon Press. As all regular sf readers will have noticed by now, the standard requested length for contributions to anthologies of original stories is 6,000 words, but I routinely exceed that, usually hoping to get away with 8,000 or even more. In this instance, alas, the editor demanded that I cut the product down to the required size, which I obligingly did, consoling myself with the thought that, one day, I would be able to reprint the unabridged version in a collection like this one.

“Some Like it Hot” was written in January 2008 in response to a request from an editor who was trying to assemble a collection of stories on the theme of global warming (which had been a constant feature of my vague future history since
The Third Millennium,
although I claim no credit for the anticipation, which was blatantly obvious even in the early 1980s to anyone but an idiot or a professional liar). The anthology was never published, probably because of the controversy deliberately stirred up by professional liars, and the story eventually appeared in
Asimov’s
in the December 2009 issue.

The most recent story in the collection, “The Golden Fleece,” written in the last days of 2011 and the early days of 2012, is original to this volume, largely because it overshot the initial target length of 6,000 words by such a ludicrously vast margin that there seemed to be no point in even trying to submit it to the market that I originally had in mind for it. Even as I realized that fact while being carried away during the white heat of the composition process, I consoled myself with the thought that I would at least be able to include it in a collection like this one.

I do not know whether there will be any further volumes in the series, but as it is proverbially unwise ever to say never, I shall refrain from negative prognostication.

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THE GOLDEN FLEECE

When Adrian told his Ph.D. supervisor, Professor Clark, that he’d been invited to the Savoy to meet Jason Jarndyke, the professor sighed.

“It wasn’t me,” the old man said.

Adrian knew what he meant. You couldn’t apply for a job at Jarndyke Industries; you had to be recommended, or spotted by a professional headhunter. Professor Clark was denying that he’d been the one to put the bloodhounds on Adrian’s trail.

“It’s okay,” Adrian assured him. “In fact, it’s the perfect opportunity for me. I only hope I can impress him.”

The professor took on the expression of a man who had just found half a caterpillar in his apple, but he controlled it swiftly. “If you think so,” he said, implying that no sane man would. “But you have real talent. You could do
anything
.”

He meant real talent as a genetic reverse engineer—the kind of talent you could take into the pharmaceutical industry, or retain in the upper echelons of Academe; the professor had never understood Adrian’s
real
real talent. Few people did—but there was just a possibility that Jason Jarndyke might appreciate its potential results, even though he was reputed to be a crass businessman and an epitome of Yorkshire bluntness, with no talent at all but a genius for making money.

Adrian was pretty sure that he could make Jason Jarndyke money
—lots
of money—by means of his talent as a reverse engineer, but his real objectives lay far beyond that. They were vague, as yet, but he was sure that they would become clearer in time. The first step was to get a good and secure job, working in the field of the genetics of pigmentation. Once that base was secure, other possibilities would become visible, with the all the myriad blues of the sky to tempt and guide him. The future would be limitless.

Adrian figured that if the industrialist could only be persuaded to glimpse the prospect of the future bottom line that innate coloration would add to his products, Jarndyke would forgive him, not only for being a effete southerner and a confirmed esthete, but even, perhaps, for having ambitions beyond the confines of the textile industry—although he hoped to keep those further ambitions under wraps to begin with, and only to confess them, as and when necessary, by degrees.