Interview with Nancy Kress on her novella Sea Change

I have written a lot about genetic engineering of people and animals, but not much about the engineering of crops or micro-organisms. In a way, this is odd, because these are already the two largest applications of genetic engineering, and likely to only become more so in the future. GMO crops, especially, is something I believe will become more and more necessary as global warming, rising sea levels, and a growing population in some parts of the world will make it harder to achieve food security for everyone. Already, the UN estimates, 10% of the world suffers from chronic hunger, and a disproportionate number of them are women and children. Crops engineered for greater yields and changing growing conditions can and will help.

However, starting fiction with a cause is dangerous, because it can lead to a polemic rather than a story. The way around this is, of course, to create a character that the cause affects: deeply, viscerally, urgently. So my original idea developed as I visualized Renata. I wanted to write about an older woman, one who has known heartbreak, because I get tired of brash, young, badass heroines. Renata is an idealist, but one who recognizes that realizing ideals happens slowly, with effort, and imperfectly. And, sometimes, at great personal cost. Once I had her in mind, and I knew what had caused that heartbreak, the story “morphed” as she did.

There is no shortage of information and speculation on how genetic engineering can turn into a catastrophe. All I had to do was pick one.

There is no shortage of information and speculation on how genetic engineering can turn into a catastrophe. All I had to do was pick one. It’s important to me that I present GMOs in a balanced way. That does NOT mean indulging the unfounded hysteria out there, or the spurious arguments (“GMOs aren’t natural!” Neither is putting vaccines or antibiotics into your body—do you want a recurrence of bubonic plague?) It does mean looking for a risk that actually could materialize, as well as presenting carefully how low that risk is.

I always research the science carefully, using journals, books, reliable on-line sites, and scientists who are willing to talk to me. That’s what I did for “Sea Change,” for both the negative aspects of The Catastrophe and the positive work that the Org is trying to accomplish.

The research, writing, and revising took a few months, which is normal for me to write a novella. It does, however, depend on the time of year. In the summer, when I am teaching and traveling more, and during the stretch of holidays from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day, very little writing of any kind gets done. However, if I have two or three months in a row without much interruption, I can write even a novella as long as “Sea Change.” It took longer to bring to market because the publisher and I had to find a Native American sensitivity reader familiar with Northwest Pacific tribes to go over the manuscript and make suggestions. Which we did.

Well, if she hadn’t been an activist, she probably wouldn’t have ever joined a group like the Org, which would have killed the entire story. So, yes, she’s an activist from literary necessity as well as personal idealism. When she’s young, in the flashback sequences, she supports a lot of different causes, scatter-shot. She’s experimenting. They’re all good causes, but she risks nothing to support them until she first becomes involved in justice for abused Native American women, and then until Ian eats those clams. What affects us personally is often what we commit to most deeply.

I have known a few dedicated activists, although none taking the risks that Renata does. I’m sure they’re out there, but secrecy is part of their lives.

The three causes that I consider most pressing today are, globally, the warming of the planet and genetic engineering, and in the United States, income inequality. My father, who is 95, remembers the rioting at River Rouge in the 1930s, which could have led to revolution if FDR had not put in programs to address the Depression. The same thing could eventually happen here if we as a country do not find ways to deal with unemployment and underemployment caused by automation, globalization, and the shifting of value from workers to upper management. The unemployment rate may be low as I write this, but that is partly because too many families are holding down multiple low-paying jobs to try to keep their bills paid. Add burgeoning medical costs, including life-saving prescription drugs, and you have a volatile situation. It is naïve to think revolution, in some form, could not happen here.

I am not really an activist. In my fiction I often (not always) I describe situations, including their projection forward into possible futures—“futures,” plural, not “the” future, because SF writers are not clairvoyant. (In fact, my novella in the March issue of ASIMOV’S SCIENCE FICTION magazine, “Semper Augustus,” concerns income inequality.) And I vote for those candidates I think most likely to deal with these issues.

No, I don’t at all feel that CRISPR/CAS9 is overblown. It represents an incredible and essential step forward in being able to do genetic engineering. However, it is not always exact in all situations, and when you’re dealing with crops outside a lab—or pretty much any genetic engineering outside closed systems—you have to be as careful as possible. CRISPR is something to build on, which is what the Org is doing. You’ll notice that in “Sea Change” I call The Catastrophe a “monkey event:” if enough monkeys type long enough, eventually they will produce Hamlet even though the odds are vanishingly small. Miniscule odds are not zero odds. The Catastrophe monkey event happened through horizontal gene transfer: the movement of genetic material between unrelated species by some means other than reproduction. It didn’t even happen as a direct result of lab tinkering.

I think the future of gene editing is very promising, provided (1) it is overseen by careful regulation, and (2) the regulation is not aimed at strangling it completely.

I think all corporations have a responsibility to their customers AND to the environment. You are exactly right that in my novella, Big Agriculture is the villain. However, it could not do what it does if our current business climate were not a barely regulated, winner-take-all culture. If there is a solution to that problem, I don’t know what it is, but I hope someone somewhere does.

My term “drivies” refers not just to self-driving RVs, but self-driving anythings: cars, trucks, taxis. There is not a particular boom in the RV market. Where self-driving vehicles will make their first big impact is long-haul trucking, because highway driving is less tricky than city driving with its more frequent turns, traffic lights, pedestrians, dogs, parallel parking, etc. There are about 3.5 million truck drivers nationwide. Morgan Stanley has estimated that the savings of automated freight delivery would be $168 billion dollars a year overall. Drivies, all by themselves, have a huge potential to impact our economy. And while the news media tends to focus on the accidents and failures of self-driving vehicles thus far, this tech change is coming.

Robotics is not an area I know a lot about. But I read, and robots that can harvest crops are already in use on test farms. Similarly, robots that can go into collapsed or toxic buildings to rescue people, or at least locate them, are in use. We don’t have cop bots yet because law enforcement has a large human component of decision making, handling heightened emotions, and obeying laws designed to protect people’s rights. On the other hand, I can see future partnerships between a human cop and, under its command, a robot that does not tire during a foot chase, cannot be overpowered by a big man, and does not collapse or die if shot.

The technologies driving robotics include mechanical engineering, machine learning, and AI. The advances are coming quickly. Have you seen what the bots at MIT have been engineered to do? It’s astonishing. Google it.

Since there aren’t yet cop-bots patrolling refugee tent cities, I don’t know how they “actually work.” Certainly there is the potential for enormous abuse. A key question here is how much privacy citizens are willing to give up in return for increased safety. But, then, that’s been a question for decades. Advancing technology just makes the question more acute.

Automated law enforcement has no bearing on the kind of GMO Catastrophe, or the GMO crop advances, that I portray in “Sea Change.” Genetic engineering is a subtle activity. The most that can be done—and in my novella, does occur—is aerial surveillance of fields. My scientists get around that by having all work done small-scale (so far) in greenhouses.

Yes, this is being studied currently in various labs around the world, including MIT, which is working on transferring genes from bacteria that can fix nitrogen directly from the air, into cereal crops. Today’s “realms of science fiction” may become tomorrow’s reality.

Renata, like most of my characters, developed herself. No, that’s not exactly true. But the way I work is to get a general idea of who this person is, and then try to “become” that character as I write scene after scene. How would Renata, given her personality and history and circumstances, react to this? To that? To another possibility? It’s not really an intellectual exercise; it’s closer to what Method actors do when they create a role on stage or film. If that sounds mystical…well, it’s as close as I can explain it.

As for the other elements of the story—genetic engineering, the Catastrophe, the algae blooms on the Pacific—those are more the results of research. But it is Renata who interacts with them all. Everything in the world is in a constant state of change, and so that necessarily includes her.

Jake does not rescue Renata, which is what your description sounds like. He provides cash, yes, but she already had a plan, and his help just made it possible to carry it out sooner. At the end, she leaves the Caymans to go back home and resume her activism there. As for hope—I do believe it always exists, because change always exists. Some change, of course, is for the worse. But some is not, and you just don’t know what will happen next. You can’t know. That’s why I’ve never understood suicide, except by the terminally ill. Suicide says, I will always feel this terrible because things will always be this terrible…but they might not be.

This doesn’t mean that hope means “Just sit around and wait for change.” A person—and the world—has a better chance of having good rather than bad change if they take steps to achieve something positive. And even if that positive change is small, it is not nothing.

Neither. I never thought of Jake that way until I read your question. Although, if it’s true that Jake is a force of nature in Renata’s life, so is she in his.

You want me to explain why one person feels driving, passionate love for this other person but not that one? You overestimate my powers 😉 But I do know that sometimes two people meet, love, and form a bond that, even if the relationship does not work out, connects them for life.

No, I think you covered everything I would have thought to ask, and some things I wouldn’t have. Thank you for the interview.