Darwin's Bastards Read online

  DARWIN'S BASTARDS

  © 2010 D&M Publishers Inc.

  Introduction © 2010 Zsuzsi Gartner

  Stories © 2010 Adam Lewis Schroeder, Lee Henderson, Douglas Coupland, Stephen Marche, Yann Martel, Timothy Taylor, Mark Anthony Jarman, Jessica Grant, Elyse Friedman, Annabel Lyon, Anosh Irani, William Gibson, Buffy Cram, Paul Carlucci, Sheila Heti, Heather O’Neill, Oliver Kellhammer, Laura Trunkey, David Whitton, Pasha Malla, Neil Smith, Jay Brown, Matthew J. Trafford.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For a copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  Douglas & McIntyre

  An imprint of D&M Publishers Inc.

  2323 Quebec Street, Suite 201

  Vancouver BC Canada V5T 4S7

  www.douglas-mcintyre.com

  Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada

  ISBN 978-1-55365-492-6 (pbk.)

  ISBN 978-1-55365-616-6 (ebook)

  Cover design, lettering, and illustrations by Peter Cocking

  We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, the Province of British Columbia through the Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

  Some of these stories have been previously published in various journals in different forms: “Survivor” by Douglas Coupland in McSweeney’s; “Personasts” by Stephen Marche in Conjunctions; “We Ate the Children Last” by Yann Martel in Grain; “Remote Control” by Annabel Lyon in Geist; “There is No Time in Waterloo” by Sheila Heti in McSweeney’s; “Crush” by Oliver Kellhammer in Vancouver Review; and “Fire from Heaven” by Laura Trunkey in Vancouver Review.

  DISCLAIMER: This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real corporations, institutions, and persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental or a figment of the reader’s own febrile imagination.

  CONTENTS

  A few (hundred) words from the editor Zsuzsi Gartner

  SURVIVORS

  This Is Not the End My Friend Adam Lewis Schroeder

  The Aurochs Lee Henderson

  Survivor Douglas Coupland

  The Personasts: My Journeys Through Soft Evenings and Famous Secrets Stephen Marche

  We Ate the Children Last Yann Martel

  Sunshine City Timothy Taylor

  LOVERS

  The December Astronauts (or Moon-base Horse Code) Mark Anthony Jarman

  Love in the Pneumatic Tube Era Jessica Grant

  I Found Your VOX Elyse Friedman

  Remote Control Annabel Lyon 199

  Notes from the Womb Anosh Irani

  OUTLIERS

  Dougal Discarnate William Gibson

  Large Garbage Buffy Cram

  This Morning All Night Paul Carlucci

  There Is No Time in Waterloo Sheila Heti

  The Dreamlife of Toasters Heather O’Neill

  Crush Oliver Kellhammer

  WARRIORS

  Fire from Heaven:

  A Dystopian Suite Laura Trunkey

  Twilight of the Gods™ David Whitton

  1999 Pasha Malla

  Atheists Were Almost Right About Everything Neil Smith

  Gladiator Jay Brown

  The Divinity Gene Matthew J. Trafford

  The Authors

  Gratitude

  A FEW HUNDRED WORDS

  FROM THE EDITOR

  on EVOLUTION, PROPHETS (false & otherwise), GODS & MONSTERS, HISTORY, the Possibilities of LOVE (or something like it), the FUTURE, MORAL IMAGINATION, DYSTOPIAS & UTOPIAS, my idea of FUN, the concept of –ISH, and, of course, DARWIN & BASTARDS.

  JUST THIS MORNING my son said to me, “You know how some mutations are successful and some aren’t?” Honestly, these are the kinds of things I wake up to, the sleep not yet out of my eyes. “In the world of the book you’re reading, or in our world?” I asked him. I didn’t say “in the real world” because we both know the world of a story is a real world too. It turns out he meant both, and followed up with a nine-year-old’s rapid textbook synopsis of evolution and adaptation that would have had your average proponent of Intelligent Design sticking her fingers in her ears and humming I can’t hear you!

  But in the world (or rather, worlds) of the book my son is reading1 it turns out that with each successful mutation of a species the world splits off into another frequency where things evolve differently—so there are multiples of our Earth, same year AD, but with no road not taken. In one of these frequencies there exists a being that looks like a giant, purple, five-armed baby, a fish-head with tentacles and the lower body of an eel (“feels,” they’re called), and big spiky trees with thorns for bark. And a cat-ish creature, and a dog-ish creature.

  Ish. Bear with me.

  I adore Charles (Chuck, Chas) Darwin. Not because he’s the go-to guy on natural selection,2 but because he was a man of faith whose belief was sorely tested when a daughter died young, and I’m convinced he retained threads of that faith, like a vestigial limb, long after his On the Origin of Species challenged the orthodoxy of the day; because of his lifelong, childlike curiosity; because for a man of science he was riddled with unscientific contradictions;3 because in his writings he uses exclamation marks as liberally as a fourteen-year-old girl; and because at sixteen he wrote in a letter from Cambridge to a cousin: “My Dear Fox, I am dying by inches, from not having any body to talk to about insects—”

  What would Darwin make of what has become of natural selection with humankind’s aspirations to godlike dominion over all of creation? The wolf indeed dwells with the lamb: in an emboldened new world of pharmaceutical and technological wonders, of changes wrought by environmental degradation, aren’t we all Darwin’s bastard children?

  Genetic engineering, cosmetic pharmacology, avatar sex, Google-brains, melting ice caps, and everything virtual, nothing private. 1984 came and went and Big Brother doesn’t scare us anymore because we’re either auditioning for the TV show or one of its freak offspring, or else playing our own Big Brothers with blogs and webcams. And I don’t know about you, but the term “recombinant DNA” fills me with as much dread these days as the words “global warming,” if not more.

  “For the first time,” wrote the editors of Nature magazine in 2007 in a simpatico commentary on synthetic biology, “God has competition.” And so does Darwin. The chief proponent of the technology, a Stanford professor who is also co-founder of the BioBricks Foundation,4 told a New Yorker reporter this fall: “What if we could liberate ourselves from the tyranny of evolution by being able to design our own offspring?”

  Are we witnessing the final evolution—or implosion—of our species? (Of all species? Speaking of scary, millions of sockeye salmon vanished from the west coast of North America this year—just like that. The grizzlies are more concerned than the humans.) Is there any doubt that the future is now? Will our descendants be human —or human-ish?

  Ah, but we’re writers here, imaginative writers, as the late master of dystopian landscapes and sensibilities J.G. Ballard called those who explored worlds other than our own (always leaving silently dangling the implication of what other writers were)5— not scientists or seers. Our business is to ask What If?

  What if someone decoded the DNA of the Tasmanian tiger, an animal believed to have been extinct for over seventy years?— oops, that’s been done. But, what if someone resurrected the DNA of Jesus Christ? What if (a.k.a. Prince) was the last man on Earth? What if celebrity became a crime? What if marauding gangs of over-educated, deep
ly philosophical homeless people invaded your suburban neighbourhood? What if private golf clubs were the new nation-states? What if your BlackBerry could be programmed to function like the Oracle of Delphi?

  What if, just what if, someone fished the last star from the sky?

  This is the part where I’m supposed to extol the far-reaching significance of these stories, of this entire enterprise; how it will profoundly change the way you perceive the world, our world, the real world, as well as chasten you to further reduce your carbon footprint, pour your little blue pills into the garbage, go off-line, barricade your doors against both the wolves and the sheep (and the wolf-ish and the sheep-ish), plant heirloom tomatoes and join hands and sing “Kumbaya” one more time before it’s too late.

  You can get all egg-heady about it, too, if you like. I could tell you that because most of these writers didn’t grow up in the shadow of the Cold War, the overall spectre is not that of nuclear annihilation or forced egalitarianism, not a paralyzing (dis)order, but the chaos of capitalism run amuck, modern terrorism, collapsing ecosystems, and death by anomie and ennui. I could tell you that these writers are unafraid of engaging with pop culture, and that although most of their stories are set in the near-future6 or in a version of our ever-changing present, the past haunts many of them much the way that the history of our species (and of every species) haunts our own bodies at the cellular level.

  I could also wax Latinate about utopias vs. dystopias vs. the apocalyptic. In fact, I can go one better and simply quote William Gibson from “Dougal Discarnate,” his meta-fictive ode to the Vancouver neighbourhood of Kitsilano: “One person’s raging dystopia is another’s hot immigration opportunity.” How true. In Lee Henderson’s “The Aurochs,” a beleaguered curator of post-industrial antiquities is dying to retire from a tired Earth to luxe Mars; whereas Mark Anthony Jarman’s lovesick space cowboy in “The December Astronauts” waits longingly on a colonized moon to be reassigned to Earth.

  But what if I told you that this book is supposed to be fun? My idea of fun7—entertaining and provocative, punch-drunk on language, fizzing with ideas. And that’s what I got when I asked Canadian short-fiction writers not normally known for an exploration of future times8 for their social satire, fabulist tales, and irreverent dystopian visions of the day after tomorrow. The one stipulation: the stories could not already have been published in book form, as Darwin’s Bastards is not meant so much to be an “anthology” as a collection of original fiction— an album of new, unheard music, not greatest hits. The response was so enthusiastic that the book you hold in your hands is almost twice as fat as originally intended, the majority of its pages seen here in print for the first time.

  Surprises? Only one. That so many of these stories are about the possibility of love. Sure, there are survivors, outliers,9 and warriors, too. But a lot of the survivors are lovers as well. And some of the lovers, warriors. All of the warriors, outliers. And the outliers do their damnedest to survive.

  Regrets? Only two. There are no talking animals in these pages (at least of the non-human variety) and no giant, purple, five-armed babies.10

  But there are the stories—kinetic, idiosyncratic, disturbing, hilarious and heartbreaking, rife with moral imagination, and deeply human. Nothing –ish about it.

  ZSUZSI GARTNER

  Vancouver, October 17, 2009

  1Ignatius MacFarland: Frequenaut! by Paul Feig (also the writer of an adult memoir called Superstud).

  2 The theory of evolution would eventually have come into being whether Darwin had existed or not. It was present in l’air du temps. For instance, the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace sent a paper outlining his own version of natural selection to Darwin in 1858, and the two men quickly published a joint paper on the subject, a year prior to the latter’s groundbreaking book.

  3 Desperate for respite from his ceaseless intestinal and other ailments, Darwin (who may have suffered from a) hypochondria, b) panic disorder, c) Lupus, d) lactose intolerance, or e) all of the above) allowed himself to be subjected to hydrotherapy, electrical stimulation of his abdomen with a “shocking belt,” and other quackeries of his time.

  4 Drew Endy, former Lego fanatic and modern-day Dr. Frankenstein, and president of the non-profit foundation (which makes available the components of DNA in a kind of on-line catalogue), prefers to say he’s “constructing” rather than “creating.”

  5 He did tell an interviewer back in 1988, “I think realistic fiction has shot its bolt—it just doesn’t describe the world we live in anymore.”

  6 Liberally interpreted by the authors as anything from an alternate Year 2000, to a cozily close 2015, to the early 24th century.

  7 Also the name of a novel by British writer Will Self, author of some of the most freakishly good dystopian fictions of the past decade or so, and who could be viewed as Ballard’s bastard literary offspring.

  8 With the exception of Gibson (who publishes his first short story since 1997 in this collection) and Douglas Coupland, whose latest novel, Generation A, traces implications of a world without bees.

  9 Before that smarty pants Malcolm Gladwell co-opted it for his 2008 book on success, Outliers, the term connoted “a result differing greatly from others in the same sample,” and that is the spirit I use it in.

  10 Adam Lewis Schroeder’s talking vacuum cleaners in “This is Not the End My Friend” are pretty fine consolation, though.

  SURVIVORS

  ADAM LEWIS SCHROEDER

  THIS IS NOT THE END MY FRIEND

  YUKON

  Dear reader every kilometre is the farthest I have been from the ocean in my whole life story. When Carla cracks her window the air is like a sandblaster scouring mould off so she shuts it again.

  “What is that?” I say

  “A dead deer,” says Oldy Oldster

  “Composter will pick it up,” says Uncle Chad. “Nothing we can do to help it, girls.”

  So this is where the land mammals come to die.

  ONCE UPON A TIME PEOPLE ATE MEAT, writes Carla

  AND PUKED IN THEIR SLEEP, I type with my thumbs. Uncle Chad and Carla and I are driving Oldy Oldster from the dock at Hope to a little town hours and hours away so he can talk to a ROCKSTAR

  WHAT IS THE PLACE CALLED AGAIN? I type into my phone

  Dear reader you cannot imagine how many times I have had to fix my mistakes. Uncle Chad said that before the talker software got good enough they used to TYPE everything so I am typing these words on one of their old phones he gave Carla and I so we could TEXT each other across the back seat. Half a metre to my right Carla writes into her phone it is called SUMMERLAND

  I type SUMMERLAND SOUNDS LIKE A CONDOVILLE WHERE THE OLYMPIANS SOAK IN WINDEX.

  THAT WAS LOATHING she types. DOES WINDEX TURN YOUR HAIR BLONDE? and she is right. I thought it was loathing too. Carla is bored now so bites her cuticles. Earrings like helicopters.

  Uncle Chad says Oldy Oldster is an ethno-music-ologist called Dr. Bryant Cuban who was friends with the parents of Aunt Miriam before Aunt Miriam and her parents died in the flood. They did not die the same DAY as our parents but the same WEEK. We have had other bad weeks since then like the capsize for example but once Uncle Chad said that that one was THE WORST WEEK and he would call the story of his life THE WORST WEEK and he petted the cat so its tail twisted up his sleeve and he laughed. Like a life story is a joke and nobody would actually want to read THE CONFESSIONS OF ZRBZTZ21 or MY LIFE SO FAR BY A3B03392 but I sure would and so would the girls from the pigsty up the hill. So I am writing a life story every minute. It will start when the dike around Vancouver got a hole in it even tho I was a baby

  My thumbs are so sore. Carla says her thumbs are tough from ping-pong that is why she is sending a message every two seconds about the birds flying over the trees while it takes me forever. But she does not know I found a NOTES section in the thing so I am writing the good stuff the pants stuff in the NOTES section but every five minutes I write her a message and say T
HIS WINCES because I cannot find the symbol to make an abbreviation so I have to write the entire word every time so I am talking like the vacuum. SORRY TO BRUISE MISS YUKON, the robot vacuum says, BUT I THOUGHT THE LEG OF YOUR SLACKS WAS THE HAT RACK. Uncle Chad said before vacuums got sentient the houses were messy but you did not have to watch for them creeping up behind you all the time. And he says MISS YUKON is funny as stink and I ought to wear my tiara more often

  DR. CUBAN

  Whirring east between the pines, tucked as I am behind the wheel of the rental car as Chad nods half-asleep against his seatbelt and the two girls smirk behind me, I keep having to shake my head to keep from thinking it’s twenty-odd years before. The trees are so much alike, you see. In ’37 I drove my colleagues to Moncton for the academic conference that would ultimately elect to preserve Alan Lomax’s field recordings—rescued the previous month, you may recall, before the Smithsonian was devoured in flame—by launching them into space. But our car was stopped by an Olympian roadblock outside Rivière-du-Loup. I shut the ignition off and sat gazing at their blinking cameras, AK-47s and boom microphones, but my colleagues had evidently watched the American feeds more closely than I and so knew what these “people” were capable of, and therefore panicked and ran for the woods. When the Olympians approached the car afterwards they actually asked for my ID— hard to believe, I know, but those were early days—and, stranger still, one of them recognized the Forces Veteran Discount stamp on the back of my driver’s licence and hurried it over to their leader, a dog-collared girl of twelve. I remembered her as the Bible-quoting stepdaughter on some short-lived sitcom, and that brief celebrity must have earned her sergeant’s stripes with the Olympians. With a toothy, blood-spattered grin she returned the cards and waved me under the steel hawsers, and that night, in a Moncton motel room, I watched loops of my colleagues being summarily gutted outside Rivière-du-Loup via a rebroadcast feed sponsored by Kissinger’s Tooth-Whitening &Ass-Tightening Spray, while down the hall the Archival Redistribution Chair blared Lomax’s record of Ervin Webb singing, “I’m goin’ home, oh, YES!”