Fictional white razor girls versus real-world three-parent embryos

The illustration shows a pale-skinned razor girl – an enlightened feminist who can fight and defeat men in hand-to-hand combat because, in part, she has retractable bionic razors implanted in her fingers. Weak 20th century women scratched with their fingernails; the razor girl can cut a strong man’s head off his neck.

Cyberpunk had a false start, a few years of glory and then rapidly degenerated into social-justice warrior crap.

The false start was from the 1970s to 1984, during which proto-cyberpunk stories were getting written, but they didn’t have any identity or force. Some tremendously edgy and nihilistic stories were written, but could not get published due to puritanical publishers; nowadays, many of these stories are hard to find in print due to stupid and venal copyright laws.

1982 was the year of Blade Runner, and suddenly cyberpunk had jumped fully-formed from the collective unconsciousness. The cyberpunk world looked like Hong Kong, had some flying cars (police spinners) and blimps that broadcast intrusive advertisements. There were artificial test-tube babies, but no bionic implants.

(At this point, bionic implant sci-fi existed, but was not cyberpunk. Bionics were Steve Austin’s super-strength, or Luke Skywalker’s artificial hand. Marvel Comics’ Wolverine had used retractable bionic claws since October 1974.)

Then, in 1984, Gibson published Neuromancer, and suddenly cyberpunk was all about bionic implants. (The movie The Terminator certainly made the juxtaposition of flesh and chrome very interesting to young sci-fi fans; while it was not cyberpunk, this movie had a huge impact on the collective imagination of sci-fi fans, and made implants fascinating to people who would have never considered them before.)

Gibson was a typical Baby Boomer feminist; he was only willing to imagine worlds with sassy, sexually-active feminists. He was incapable of writing realistically about any negative consequences resulting from sexual promiscuity. He imagined that there would be horrible diseases, but nothing would ever prevent beautiful hipsters from having lots and lots of promiscuous sex. (The awfulness of Gibson’s sex-related writing could be the topic for a separate essay.)

In 1986, Walter Jon Williams’ Hardwired presented bionic implants, semi-realistic sexual issues, and anarcho-capitalist future noir. Literarily, this was a huge improvement on Gibson, but Gibson had better publicity – and probably more support from the Social Justice Warriors of the publishing industry – so Gibson is remembered as the central figure of cyberpunk.

For a while, when the AIDS scare was still somewhat fresh, it was possible to believe in cyberpunk fiction that featured sassy, promiscuous, violent ladies. This culminated in 1987 with Pris Asagiri in Bubblegum Crisis. Asagiri is the ultimate cyberpunk-feminist ideal.

In 1987, Robocop combined bionic implants and futuristic noir storytelling in a dystopian Detroit; decades later, the humiliating real-world collapse of Detroit greatly resembled the movie, but of course the real world was less glamorous and had fewer cyborg battles.

In 1988, Kadrey’s Metrophage took cyberpunk to territory that would probably disturb soft-sci-fi social justice warriors like Gibson. The sex in Metrophage was intense, semi-realistic, and infinitely more disturbing than Gibson’s politically-correct feminist sex.

Many sci-fi readers who had never bothered to read Marvel Comics suddenly saw retractable claws for the first time in games like Shadowrun (1989). In such games, the players could strut around futuristic dystopias in stylish clothes, slice people apart, and somehow never have problems cleaning the blood off their stylish clothes.

I may take the time to write about bionic implants in sci-fi some time. But for now I will just note that the real world of 2015 has very few bionic implants, and none of them are used to slice people up. In the real world, cleaning up blood stains is a tedious chore that buzzkills any glamorous thrills one might find in violence.

Cyberpunk failed to foresee a lot of details.

A – Cyberpunk has always featured a lot of prostitutes and promiscuity; the notion was that the vast majority of men would use them. But in fact, the vast majority of men prefer cheap porn, and prostitutes face a huge amount of competition from promiscuous unpaid volunteers. Edgy stories like Dr. Adder by K.W. Jeter failed to foresee the impact of cheap sex.

B – Cyberpunk juxtaposed guerrilla-war-level violence with semi-civilized noir anarcho-capitalist society. Cyberpunk assumed that megacorps would abolish ALL politics and cash would replace all voting. This is a lot less stable than cyberpunk fiction liked to pretend. The long-running guerrilla wars are supported by states much stronger than those imagined by cyberpunk – e.g. Israel and the USA! The grim dark of reality has very little anarcho-capitalism and a lot of anarcho-tyranny.

C – Cyberpunk was excited by the cool-factor of bionic implants and failed to imagine how difficult it is to make a useful implant. Cyberpunk also overestimated the degree to which implants would be more effective than plain humans.

D – Cyberpunk was overexcited by sex and politically correct notions of feminism. This led to imagining a future full of highly effective feminists, when in fact real life delivered Janet Reno, Hillary Clinton, Madeleine Albright, Carly Fiorna, and Lynndie England.

The present post was inspired by Rebecca Taylor, who wrote:
The UK has officially approved the creation of embryos with three genetic parents, and babies created with this technique are likely to be born within the next year.

This is unprecedented. The UK government has officially sanctioned the germ-line genetic engineering of its citizens and their decedents. British children (and their children, and their grandchildren) will be genetic engineering experiments. Horrifying.

Many experts are concerned about the safety of the technique. They think the invasive, cloning-likeprocedure is sure to cause birth defects. Even a well-known pro-ESC, pro-cloning scientist urged the UK not to move forward. The reality is that any baby not developing normally will be aborted, and we will likely never hear about the “failures” of this radical experimentation. Horrifying.

Others are rightly concerned that this will open the door to more invasive and extensive engineering. It is not out of the realm of possibility, especially since the UK just changed the definition of “genetic modification” to allow this technique to bypass current laws against germ-line genetic modifications in humans. Future linguistic gymnastics surrounding human genetic engineering is probable. Horrifying.

But what I find even more horrifying is the silence. Silence from Catholics, pro-lifers, and the general public. I find it deafening.

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http://www.creativeminorityreport.com/2015/03/silence-on-three-parent-embryos-is.html

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Time will tell whether three-parent embryos lead to biological disasters. Maybe I should be worried about the lives lost to abortion, but mostly I’m worried about genetically-modified plagues sweeping out of the embryo labs and devastating the populace.

In a few years, after the three-parent children have been born, we will have a better grasp of how viable the technology is. If it works well, we will be headed toward a Kadrey-style dystopia of body horror. If it fails, there will be a few dead babies and that will be the end of it. We have lots of dead babies from bombs, starvation, and disease already. A few more from botched genetic engineering wouldn’t change the situation much.