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Fragments
GENESIS: The Concept
First there's the word play. If you've studied Latin at all, this will have occurred to you, but if you haven't it might not have.
The root word "gens"--Latin meaning family or clan--is possibly one of the most interesting words to have been borrowed by the English language.
First off, it has survived intact as itself. The word gens has been borrowed whole from Latin and carries the same denotations and connotations that it did in classical Latin.
But it also has been incorporated into dozens of words, all centering around the concept of creation or reproduction. Progenitor, generation, generate, miscegenation, genital, progeny ... And one that gets a lot of play, but is so poorly understood these days ... gender. The utterly charming and fascinating concept that a WORD can have SEX. Not that it engages in copulation, but that it possesses the attribute of sex. Of being male or female. Well, masculine or feminine.
And the word Genesis comes from that same root. And, of course, it's the first book of the Pentateuch... the five books of Moses around which the modern Bible of Judaism and of Christianity is built. (Well, of Christianity. There is no formal "Bible" as such to Judaism, but the books of Moses are considered holy scripture in any case.) And it is called Genesis, because it deals with the creation of the world.
Lots of folks confuse Genesis with Beginning, though there should be no connection. A Genesis can come in the middle of something ... an important point.
But I chose the word for a more prosaic reason. I liked the connotation added by its use in connection with the Genesis Effect, as posited by Gene Roddenberry in the Star Trek movie, the "Wrath of Kahn".
In that movie, a team of Terran scientists had developed something they called the Genesis Effect, whereby they could "seed" an otherwise lifeless planet with one or more pods which would generate (there's that root again
I always thought that Roddenberry and Co. wimped out in their portrayal of the Genesis Effect. I could picture what the effect would be like on the ground. It would literally tear apart--at a molecular level ... breaking chemical bonds--any living thing in its path. (You will recall that was the jeopardy that Kirk and his son were in.) And yet, it has an incredible power--the power to endow undifferentiated plasma with life. (It was that power that saved Spock's life.) If the Genesis Effect were to be set off in an atmosphere, the resulting storm would have to be nothing short of cataclysmic, as it transformed a poisonous atmosphere into one capable of sustaining life... and did it within hours. (Or was it minutes? Whatever... a really short time.)
That's not what I conceived the Genesis storm to be or even to be like, but that's one of the points of inspiration for me.
Now, when I first started writing Dolly, (or Gab Dolly as she was known then... and, really, up until I started writing "A Report from New Xenaland"), I was having some trouble with the concept of this doll come to life all on her own. And I wasn't comfortable with the idea of my lead character's having sex with a 12" plastic doll. I'll do a lot for my art, but there ARE lines I have trouble crossing, even in imagination. So I had to make her somehow real.
And I got this picture, (based on the future battle scenes from Between the Lines where ROC is wearing Shakti's shirt, pantaloons, and turban, and is running around with that curved sword that looks a LOT like a katana), of Dolly going berserk in the Center's parking lot.
And then there were the mehndi prints on the doc's couch. And I knew I had to figure out how she got from being this 12" dolly to being a real girl. (Without being able to use the word "girl" in public.
It struck me like a stage in a hero's quest. Something that the hero of a story has to go through ... a purification or a becoming kind of thing. A ritual. A test. All of that.
So it would have to be hard--difficult hard, I mean. It wouldn't be something you'd just... You wouldn't run down to the beauty salon and have an autoclone body "done" for you.
Y'know?
It would have to be like a full-body wax job and a full-blood replacement AND a nose job and maybe a complete skin graft PLUS being rolfed and est-ed and maybe being gang-prayed over by Jehovah's Witnesses all at the same time but more intense.
It would fuck with your mind and be extremely physically painful and you would have to pay this incredible, unmentionable price for it. And then there would be the moral issue of the body: where it came from, what was the right and wrong of its creation or procurement...
I haven't even now begun to scratch the surface of the potential moral issues. And they're all the ones that we think we might be facing if medical science can develop viable human cloning. Plus maybe a few.
Next: GENESIS: How it works | Previous: Pete's Father (a.k.a. The Sergeant)