The Paris Review

On December 19, 2011, one of the main characters in Adam Johnson’s new novel, The Orphan Master’s Son, died. His name was Kim Jong Il. Had Kim lived, he might have approved of the impish, devious, and dangerously mercurial simulacrum that Johnson summons in his epic about modern North Korea, published by Random House this month. He may have been less pleased that an ordinary citizen named Jun Do usurps him as the hero of the book—springing from a labor camp in a doomed quest for freedom.

Johnson, who teaches fiction at Stanford’s Stegner Program and grew up in South Dakota and Arizona, has written about characters caught in dystopian settings before (he is the author of a short-story collection, Emporium, and a novel, Parasites Like Us) but never on such a grand scale or in such unfamiliar territory. Earlier this month I caught up with him by phone to ask how he came to write about North Korea, and about the perils of researching a place about which so little is known. Read More »

As a supplement to our science-fiction issue, I’ve been reading Fredric Jameson’s super brainy Archaeologies of the Future, his defense of SF as the last redoubt of utopianism. Jameson also makes some helpful distinctions between SF and fantasy, to the detriment of the latter (a nice antidote to Harry Potter mania). It has brought back memories of many childhood afternoons spent reading Asimov, Le Guin, and Frank Herbert—books I thought I’d forgotten but am happy to rediscover. —Robyn Creswell

I’ve been fully immersed in Sheila McClear’s memoir The Last of the Live Nude Girls, about her time spent working in a Times Square peep show—eye-opening, gritty, and compelling. —Sadie Stein

I’m contributing from the Palovista Ranch this week, where I’ve been writing but also rereading one of my favorite novels, Blood Meridian and, for the first time, Suttree. As expected, Cormac McCarthy is the perfect companion for long walks around the desert. —Natalie Jacoby

If you get a chance to see the documentary Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness, be sure to: it’s not just a portrait of the iconic Yiddish writer but also of a lost world. I found it deeply moving. —S. S.

Dani Shapiro on the difference having a child has on a memoirist: “After all, one can’t write with abandon if one is worrying about the consequences. And to have children is to always, always worry about the consequences.” —T. L.

I’ve got a girl crush on former Paris Review intern, Believer editor, and author extraordinaire Vendela Vida. Read her Guardian interview on lying, The Lovers, and why she and Dave Eggers don’t linger over dinner. —Mackenzie Beer

Why Splice isn't science fiction.

To enjoy Splice, it helps if you've read so much psychoanalysis that the whole idea of screwing one parent and murdering the other strikes you as a bit camp.

The science, for one thing, isn't all that edgy or alarming. Splicing human DNA with that of other organisms? Millions of Americans inject themselves daily with human insulin, which is manufactured by mixing human DNA into that of E. coli bacteria, letting the bacteria bloom, and then putting it through a blender. As it happens, human DNA has a lot of nucleotides in common with animal DNA already, so a wanton squirting of animal genes into human genes is unlikely to make a super creature. In fact, humans and roundworms have about the same number of genes, which suggests that more is not more, in the number-of-genes department. How scary is the idea of typing up an organism's entire genetic code on a computer, manufacturing it from scratch, and bringing it to life? J. Craig Venter announced a couple of weeks ago that he and his research team have done just that. Hope you've been able to sleep nights since.

As for cloning itself, the sheep Dolly, the first mammal to be cloned, was born in 1996. Bulls, cats, pigs, deer, mice, and goats have followed. By now, dog clones have been around for so long that The New York Times has run a lifestyle article about coping with the disappointment that Fido's clone only loosely resembles the original. Human cloning is illegal in some states but far from all of them, and the technical challenge is unlikely to remain insurmountable. Three years ago, monkey embryos were cloned well enough to allow the extraction of stem cells, and two years ago, scientists in California persuaded clones of adult human skin cells to progress to early-stage embryos. Once human cloning does become possible, though, there's little need to worry that it will catch on as a way of making new humans. Cloning, unlike natural reproduction, is neither inexpensive nor recreational. Moreover, it inflicts a fair amount of genetic and epigenetic damage on the progeny who ensue. You might not mind a little damage in a cow that you plan to eat, but few people are likely to want to clone themselves or their loved ones once they understand that the baby will be saddled with birth defects, developmental delays, a compromised immune system, or some combination of the above. The prospect would just be too sad.

Sadness brings us to the true subject of Splice: child rearing. Specifically, what's a two-career couple to do when an episode of hastiness and curiosity leaves them with a squirmy naked mole rat who shows ambiguous signs of a developing intelligence and even sentiment? Feed it sugar and lock it in a plastic crate for as long as possible, of course. But once it begins breaking things, cornering people, and putting words together with Scrabble tiles, then what? The most science-fiction thing about Splice is that it never occurs to Clive and Elsa to provide their unbabysitted spawn with a television. Probably because the movie is so “irredeemably Canadian,” my husband complained. It's for the same reason, no doubt, that no government agency ever shows up to sweep everything under the rug.

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