Idema, Tommy (Author)
Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society
Volume: 36
Issue: 1
Pages: 38-48
Edition Details: Special Issue: Science and Science Fiction - Volume II: Subjectivities
Language: English
In Greg Bear’s critically acclaimed science fiction novel Darwin’s Radio, the activation of an endogenous retrovirus (SHEVA), ironically located in a “noncoding region” of the human genome, causes extreme symptoms in women worldwide, including miscarriages. In the United States, a task force is assembled to control the pandemic crisis and to find out how SHEVA operates at the genomic level. However, as the story unfolds, it becomes manifest that SHEVA is too complex to decode in this way and, moreover, that it is not a disease at all. Biologist Kay Lang speculates that SHEVA is triggered by signals from the environment, and that newborn SHEVA children will be a new variation or species of Man. In this essay I analyze Bear’s literary experiment with science along Deleuze and Guattari’s important, but largely overlooked, concepts of State science and nomad science. Bear’s novel gives narrative form to nomad-scientific ideas about life, notably Lynn Margulis’s theory of endosymbiogenesis, which holds that a species’ DNA is an assemblage of many genomes acquired in symbiotic relations. The import of Bear’s informed speculations, I argue, is not crass prediction but a nomadic vision of life as always already different (impure, infected) and in becoming—a counterpoint to the image of the double helix as the bedrock of human identity. Darwin’s Radio is a key example of how fiction can be an excellent partner for science, technology, and society, analyzing and intervening in debates about life and laying bare epistemological and biopolitical tensions of technoscience.
...MoreArticle Alexander I. Stingl (2016) Introduction: “Give Me Sight Beyond Sight”: Thinking With Science Fiction as Thinking (Together) With (Others). Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society (pp. 3-27).
Similar Citations
Article
Andreas Folkers;
Sven Opitz;
(June 2022)
Low-carbon cows: From microbial metabolism to the symbiotic planet
Book
Adriana Giannini;
(2021)
Lynn Margulis: la scoperta dell'evoluzione come cooperazione
Article
Pierrick Bourrat;
Paul E. Griffiths;
(2018)
Multispecies Individuals
Book
Minelli, Alessandro;
Pradeu, Thomas;
(2014)
Towards a Theory of Development
Book
Russell Winslow;
(2017)
Organism and Environment: Inheritance and Subjectivity in the Life Sciences
Article
Lorenzo Servitje;
(2019)
Gaming the Apocalypse in the Time of Antibiotic Resistance
Article
Brook W.R. Pearson;
(2015)
The Soviet Nomad: Tarkovsky’s Science Fiction War Machine
Article
Flavio D'Abramo;
Sybille Neumeyer;
(2020)
A Historical and Political Epistemology of Microbes
Article
Cécile Fasel;
Luca Chiapperino;
(2023)
Between the genotype and the phenotype lies the microbiome: symbiosis and the making of ‘postgenomic’ knowledge
Book
Tom Idema;
(2018)
Stages of Transmutation: Science Fiction, Biology, and Environmental Posthumanism
Article
Robertson, Benjamin;
(2010)
“Some Matching Strangeness”: Biology, Politics, and the Embrace of History in Octavia Butler's Kindred
Article
Bollinge, Laurel;
(2010)
Symbiogenesis, Selfhood, and Science Fiction
Book
Weingart, Peter;
Huppauf, Bernd;
(2008)
Frosch und Frankenstein: Bilder in und über Wissenschaft---Popularisierungen und Mythenbildung
Article
Amy Cimini;
(2020)
We Don’t Know That We Don’t Know What a Body Can Do … , or Spinoza and Some Social Lives of Sonic Material
Article
M. H. V. van Regenmortel;
(2016)
The metaphor that viruses are living is alive and well, but it is no more than a metaphor
Article
Perru, Olivier;
(2011)
Le mutualisme biologique, concepts et modèles
Article
Sapp, Jan;
Carrapiço, Francisco;
Zolotonosov, Mikhail;
(2002)
Symbiogenesis: The Hidden Face of Constantin Merezhkowsky
Article
John Dupré;
Stephan Guttinger;
(2016)
Viruses as living processes
Article
Rudolf Hagemann;
(2007)
The Reception of the Schimper-Mereschkowsky Endosymbiont Hypothesis on the Origin of Plastids – Between 1883 and 1960 – Many Negative, but a Few Relevant Positive Reactions
Article
Vanessa Triviño;
Javier Suárez;
(2020)
Holobionts: Ecological communities, hybrids, or biological individuals? A metaphysical perspective on multispecies systems
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences
Science-Fiction Studies
Annals of the History and Philosophy of Biology
Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society
Centaurus: International Magazine of the History of Mathematics, Science, and Technology
Be the first to comment!