Narrative in the Age of the Genome

Lara Choksey is a Research Fellow at the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health at the University of Exeter, UK.

Imbued throughout with deep concern for the peripheral, the possible, and the political … What emerges as most compelling out of this entire tapestry of readings is the author's interpretation of the limits and failures of the extraordinary ‘cultural power of the genome.'

• Acknowledgements Introduction Chapter 1: Deindustrialisation and the Selfish Gene Gene and StrikeOverpopulation and Whiteness: Doris Lessing’s The Memoirs of a SurvivorBrackets and Choice: Samuel Delany’s Trouble on TritonChapter 2: Cultivating Dreamworlds Mutual AidCultivating HumansThe Fifth Problem: Boris and Arkady Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic Genogeography: Kir Bulychev’s “Another’s Memory”Chapter 3: Memoir and the Laboratory Metaphors of the Human Genome ProjectWelfare, Profit, and the Vitruvian ManEnding Development: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me GoAlgorithmic Governmentality in Andrew Niccols’s GattacaChapter 4: Speculative Ancestry Ancestry MakingGenre, Genetics, and GenealogyHenrietta Lacks and Stolen FleshReparation, Romance, and KinlessnessLeaving: Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your MotherStaying: Yaa Gyasi’s HomegoingChapter 5: Toxic Infrastructure Chernobyl and the Postgenomic ConditionAdaptation, Improvisation, and EpigeneticsMutation and Fragmentation: Svetlana Alexievich’s Chernobyl PrayerTransitional Characterisation: Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogyConclusion: Disappearance, community, characterisation, genre, and scale Works Cited Index