Domino Effect
Hello, everyone.
This month, I watched a documentary miniseries exploring how steam trains impacted so many different industries in Victorian Britain, and how that then impacted people’s daily lives. (Living a wild life over here). It got me thinking about how I went about handling worldbuilding in the Second Sentinels series.
For those of you who follow my newsletter but haven't read the books (which like…I’m happy to have you but what are you doing here?) I’ll add that these books are near-future scifi in a setting that deviates from our world in the late 1990s.
I basically went back to the earliest period that I was sort of aware of larger society, and added in advanced genetic engineering to the world I remembered. Then I fast forwarded several decades, right past today, to the years when my own daughter will be a teenager.
Critically, my primary worldbuilding rule is; do as little worldbuilding as I can get away with, under that premise.
That wouldn’t work if I’m inventing a whole new fantasy world from the ground up, but it seems to be working for what I’m actually doing.
The real trick here is that I’ve spent a lot of my life interacting with a lot of these systems, so I have a decent read on believable ways they’d react to my premise.
We start with the military. Mainstream superhero comics often lean into the US military being behind plot-relevant research, simply because they actually are a major research engine in the US and have been for…I don’t even know how long. A lot longer than I’ve been around. And obviously at least some people in their ranks would like genetically modified super soldiers who outperform regular people.
Then, those advancements make their way into the private sector, where it’s time for corporations to do their best to make money off of them.
Of course, recognizing potential risks and abuses in genetic modification of people takes like 0 effort.
But if you’re familiar with the criminal justice system, you know that legal regulation often lags well behind new technologies, partly because there can be a whole lot of money invested in brand new technologies and so a whole lot of money in keeping them from being limited. (Particularly if...you know…it’s the government was investing in the first place.) But, even if that wasn’t the case, my experience is that legislators often know very little about the developing technologies they’re called on to regulate.
Of the industries likely to want in, agriculture is a no-brainer (you’ll see more of that in book 3 of the series) They’re doing a lot of the genetic work already, in the real world, with some perfectly valid applications. So, while the link to human genetic modification is a stretch, they have skin in the game in terms of controlling what gets legally regulated and what doesn’t.
Then there’s the beauty industry. I think a fundamental misunderstanding of cyberpunk as a concept has given genre writers and readers an unrealistic understanding of what percentage of the populace would take genetic modification if it was presented as safe, normal, and affordable. There’s the obvious “fixing” disability or weightloss, sure. But if it was suddenly safe and legal to be a catgirl, you want me to belive there wouldn’t be a massive market for it? There would be catgirl clinics in malls across America. If we could genetically modify body odor to smell like a favorite perfume, you don’t think people would flock to gene modification spas for that? Come on, now. I hardly have to shift anything in my imaginary culture or economy to make that work. I just have to look around me.
Eventually, we get around to which industries have to step in as a result of the widespread modification.
The one that gets the most play in media is clearly the criminal justice system; what happens with law enforcement when there are a whole bunch of genetically altered people running around, with all kinds of different capabilities from the banal to the weaponized with a wide spectrum between? Obviously, I answered that with 1) the continued escalation of police militarization, just like in the real world and 2) a society several generations deep into superhero mythos will, obviously, create superheroes to sooth them about potential genetically modified criminals. You can just pop real world propaganda machines right into that and it works perfectly.
But the industry I know the best, from every angle, is the one I rarely see reflected in these stories- the medical industry.
And this is an industry I know well. I know it as a medical provider, as a medical company owner, as a mostly healthy patient who needs a quick hand, and as a patient with chronic health conditions who needs long term care. I know it from seeing behind the curtain at a variety of clinics of varying kinds. I know it from fighting with health insurance agencies.
I see a lot of the ways it works and soooo many ways it doesn’t. As an industry is has painfully predictable biases and weaknesses.
If you added genetically modified people, it wouldn’t erase it’s most habitual sexism, racism, or ableism, it just refracts them into a prism of new possibilities as it projects out onto a new axis.
This was actually one of the very earliest seeds of the Second Sentinels books. I remember being told about the Marvel comics arc about whether or not to create a federal registry to track mutants. I remember slightly horrified silence when I said the story was stupid- all you’d have to do is legally restrict medical care for mutants to government entities and most of the mutants would readily register themselves. Then you just mess with HIPAA and boom. Registry. You get everything done with policy and no Avenger vs Avenger battle required.
Good health is always a temporary condition, provided you’re not Wolverine. And controlling access points is always easier than controlling a whole demographic.
(Yes, very relevant to the action item I mentioned a few months ago. Thankfully, the idea of a federal autism registry does appear to be dead in the water. So did the massive land sale!)
I have no desire to reinvent the wheel. I mostly just show the systems I know, with one twist added. I prefer fantastical elements that hold a magnifying glass to real world issues, rather than trying to act as stand-ins, like…well, like the X-men as queer metaphor. Queer history would be different if being queer made you shoot lasers out of your eyes.
Before I get into this month’s action item, I do want to remind folks that Secondhand Origin Stories and Names in Their Blood are now available to libraries, and I’m asking folks to request their local library get a copy! It’s free, and in our local library at least, it’s pretty quick and easy. Please consider it. It is my birthday this week, after all. I think we need more stealthily queer books in libraries, where kids can get them without spending money.
And for the action item, we have the damn return of KOSA, which a huge number of queer rights, free speech, and anti-abuse organizations have already spoken out against. Just like it’s previous iterations, it demands that social media be scrubbed of anything inappropriate for minors without any definition of what that means.
Which of course means there will be a huge push to categorize anything conservatives don’t like as unacceptable; including queer material, material about race and equity, accurate sex ed, and material used by abused children to get help. I’m asking you to not only sign the petition, but to contact your reps- remember, you can call after hours and read a scripted message if you’re not good with phones. Sadly, this, of all things is a bipartisan bill, so if you’re in the US, it’s worth reaching out.
And with that, I’m signing off till next month!
See you then,
Lee Brontide
Thank you for joining me for another month of Shed Letters. If you know someone who you think would like to join us, please feel personally invited to share any of these emails, or send them an invitation to sign up here. And remember that Secondhand Origin Stories and Names in Their Blood are available for free as ebooks here, or in paperback form from your local independent book shop. And don’t forget, as a subscriber to Shed Letters, you have exclusive access to my free novelette, Doll’s Eye View, the Martin focused story that takes place between Secondhand Origin Stories and Names in Their Blood.