First Born

Book 216: S.F. MASTERWORKS

by Maureen Duffy

Genres: Science Fiction; Genetic Engineering; Hard Science Fiction

Synopsis

1981. A different Britain. When Norman Forrester of the Defence Ministry's Experimental Institute effects a successful fertilisation of a female gorilla with human sperm, an infant is born. Gordon, known as Gor, is his son in two senses. But Gor's parentage must remain a secret. He has no legal existence as an individual because his existence has never been divulged to the government data bank. In more than one way, Gor is a 'non-person'.

Operated on so that he is capable of speech, Gor grows through boyhood and adolescence into a strong, intelligent youth. When he discovers his true identity, he is devastated by his outcast destiny. But is there the possibility of a home amongst some of the exiles from a computer-dominated class-oriented society? And if Gor can find them, will they accept him?

Maureen Duffy's novel offers both an enthralling, fast-moving narrative and a vivid parable of the individual's struggle to win acceptance from his fellows and to overcome the forces that seek to destroy human individuality in any age.

Release date: July 4, 2024

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 256

Sample

Maureen Duffy’s Gor Saga (1981), republished here as First Born, has as its epigraph the famous lines about the ‘faire feld ful of folke’ from William Langland’s late fourteenth-century epic poem Piers Plowman, and it comes full circle to find such a place. In the preface to the 1983 Virago reissue of her first, semi-autobiographical novel That’s How It Was (1962), Duffy notes that:

Gor Saga has as its hero a person of two worlds, animal and human, which translates into speciesism that class and cultural division I have always lived with, and when I wanted to create a future world of mass unemployment in an era of high technology it was back to that earlier experience I turned in the belief that although human structures may seem changed out of recognition humanness remains at the heart of them.

The humanness at the heart of the book is – as Duffy notes – not speciesist, but a deep recognition of kinship that informed the animal rights activism that resulted in her subsequent book Men and Beasts: Animal Rights Handbook (1984).

From That’s How It Was and The Microcosm (1966), considered the first openly lesbian post-war British novel, onwards, Duffy’s work is an ever-widening fair field full of folk that both narrates the effects of class and cultural divisions, including speciesism, sexism, racism and homophobia as well as classism, and finds equally compelling narrative forms for resistance and regrouping. The Microcosm’s title – which refers to the underground lesbian bar that links that novel’s characters – could also suggestively refer to the temporary autonomous zone on the banks of the Severn in which the titular Gor and his multifarious chosen family find themselves at the novel’s end. It is this precarious settlement that makes the novel a saga in the Icelandic sense: Gor’s voyage out leads him to find a place where he belongs.

This is not only utopian but was a deeply political move on the novel’s first publication in 1981. Ronald Reagan and the Moral Majority were beginning their assault on the field made fairer and more full of more folk by the intertwined civil rights, women’s rights and gay rights movements; while in Britain Margaret Thatcher was already formulating the policies that would lead her to tell Women’s Own magazine in 1986 that ‘there’s no such thing as society … It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours’. This is what Duffy goes up against as a lesbian, feminist, working-class writer, who had spent the late 1970s campaigning for authors’ rights, leading to her role in the formation of both Public Lending Rights (PLR) and Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS), the latter with the support of the Trades Union Congress (TUC).

So it is from this campaigning background that, in Gor Saga, Duffy presciently realised just how destructive Thatcherite technocratic and neoliberal policies might look at their fullest extent. The book’s heroes are, simply put, those who resist the idea of abandoning their neighbours. These vividly-realised, interconnected characters largely spring from the former working class. Known in the novel – with a nod to linguist Alan Ross who coined the terms U and non-U in 1954, when they were then taken up by Nancy Mitford – as ‘nons’, it is their protest against the fixed hierarchy of class that creates the exhilarating momentum of the fourth and fifth acts. Gor Saga is republished as First Born in 2024, at another moment where this vision of the collective, collaborative and anti-capitalist engagement is palpable on the streets, and equally palpable in the forceful policing of protests and alternative forms of living together.

As in other English science fiction classics such as 1984 and Brave New World, the state in Gor Saga is untouchable in both senses. An all-encompassing but entirely distant force, it is largely automated through central computing that dictates people’s class status, schooling, employment opportunity, bank credits and access to healthcare. There are painful and enraging echoes of Duffy’s familial experience of endemic tuberculosis, including her mother’s death, in the epidemics that are allowed to ravage the ‘nons’. While Duffy’s socio-technological extrapolations are uncannily accurate – self-driving cars, satnav, self-service checkout machines, and handheld screens – they are primarily an incisive demonstration of the insidious command-control of the military-industrial complex’s capture of technology to capture us.

Technology is the state, and it is a scientist who is the most tangible figure of state power. Forester’s is the first point-of-view that the reader enters, an arrogant self-deceiver whose lineage runs from Frankenstein via Oppenheimer to Musk and beyond. Forester, who works somewhere between directly and indirectly for Defence, tells himself he is working for himself and his personal brilliance and gain, while it becomes increasingly clear his research is part of a state plan to breed super-soldiers with primate strength. That he uses his own sperm to impregnate Mary, the gorilla who is Gor’s biological mother, crystallises the character, and places a family saga with Oedipal dimensions (and refusals) at the heart of a scientific extrapolative fiction – a scientific family romance.

It’s part of the book’s genius that Forester is one of its points of view, one that Duffy richly ironises by giving full rein to his pomposity, libido and hypocrisy. Yet, as importantly, he becomes one voice among many, who are all connected to and through the very being he tries to eschew. Gor’s point of view only appears once he is taken away from his first and devastated foster mother Nancy, and it is the voices of those who subsequently care for and value Gor that swell through the book: Emily, his carer and sister; William, his brother; Ann, Forester’s wife, to whom Gor becomes a summertime ward; Emily’s and William’s mother, Mrs Bardfield; and even Forester’s nemesis, Jessop, who first connects Gor and Emily. There is a Dickensian quality to both Jessop the crafty ‘non’ who blackmails Forester and to the whole choral tapestry of voices, but the clearest, ringing tone is ‘the relationship to the mother’, as Duffy says in the preface to That’s How It Was, concluding ‘All nativities are the Nativity’. Mrs. Bardfield, whom Duffy calls the book’s ‘presiding goddess’, her daughter Emily, Nancy, Ann, the art teacher Miss Forbes, and even Gor’s school friend Empers who is, the book implies, gay, offer Gor sustaining care, becoming – to use a term from Black feminist thought, coined by Stanlie M. James and popularised by Patricia Hill Collins – othermothers, united by the shared experience of non-biological mothering and caring. It takes a village to raise Gor, and Gor to bring together the village.

As the epigraph from Piers Plowman and her scholarly and beautiful book The Erotic World of Faery (1972) both suggest, Duffy is deeply read in the English imaginative tradition that crosses over faith, folk tale, fantasy and science fiction, blurring what separates them. While Gor Saga is absolutely extrapolative science fiction, it roots that genre in the long history of faerie imaginings about nature and nurture. Forester’s wife, Ann, who plays medieval music and reads old books, remembers tales of faery changelings, and also William Shakespeare’s Caliban. There’s nothing science fiction can imagine, suggests Duffy, but that is already present in our oldest, most-told tales, in which the subject of otherness has an aspect of awe and deep knowledge, not violent rejection, at the blurred boundaries of human community. Standing athwart that boundary, Gor becomes a literal folk hero for using his strength in solidarity: like Robin Hood, he steals from the rich and shares with the poor; like Jesus, he turns tables and is crowned, albeit in a carnival atmosphere reminiscent of older English folk customs.

But Gor Saga is not a rejection of science; rather, of Eurowestern patriarchal scientism, and specifically eugenics. Duffy was inspired by Jane Goodall’s In the Shadow of Man, her classic account of primate research first published in 1971. Of its chapter titles and observational terminology, Goodall later wrote in ‘Chimpanzees: Bridging the Gap’ (1993), that she was charged for ‘brazenly used such words as “childhood”, “adolescence”, “motivation”, “excitement”, and “mood” [with …] that worst of ethological sins – anthropomorphism’. It is exactly across this gap that Duffy – and Gor – step lightly, crossing the bridge between species just as Jessop will cross the Clifton suspension bridge, finding that it is not at all as broken as fearful groups on either side suggest. Inspired by Goodall’s deep experiential embedded research on kinship, Duffy’s Gor offers an alternate bildungsroman, reflecting on how child and adolescent development have long been subjects of inquiry for scientists and philosophers as much as for novelists.

In turning to child development as a field of science fictional inquiry, Duffy not only spoofs , through Ann, the middle-class maternal anxieties of the Spock generation, but also stands in the lineage of feminist science fiction that reaches back to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), too rarely acknowledged as a novel about maternal anxieties and griefs. Duffy’s novel also resonates with two more contemporaneous classics of post-war science fiction: Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), which infamously includes a feminist future utopian vision of entirely mechanical incubation; and what’s often considered the foundational story of Anglophone post-war feminist science fiction, Judith Merril’s still chilling ‘That Only a Mother’ (1948), which like Duffy’s novel is anti-militarist and anti-scientist, written in the shadow of the bombing of Hiroshima. Readers of contemporary science fiction coming to the book on its republication might also be put in mind of Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (2013), which draws on sociological experiments in which (white male) scientists observed chimps raised (generally they did very little of the raising) alongside their human children, and, like Gor Saga, essays a passionate sibling defence of interspecies kinship and communication.

Standing in that feminist lineage, Duffy presents a rejection of essentialism and determinism. ‘Faire’, as Duffy knows as an historian of faery, itself started out as a word for light or bright, but through white supremacy comes to be associated with whiteness, and then with moral rightness. When Mrs. Bardfield uses racialised language (which Emily notes as outmoded) such as ‘Pakky’, ‘Blackie’ and ‘touch of the tar brush’, she inchoately expresses a sense that the class system is itself racialised. Where such racialised terms are used by Forester, they are as pejorative as ‘non’. Where these terms converge on characters’ interpretation of Gor’s ancestry, they demonstrate and uncover how racism and speciesism are co-constitutive.

This is crystallised most sharply in the use of the term ‘mongol’, which at the time was considered a technical scientific designation for a person with Down Syndrome (as in Devo’s 1977 song ‘Mongoloid’). Coined in 1908, the term is steeped in anti-Asian racism and eugenics. As with the other racial epithets in the book, the term makes us deeply uncomfortable as contemporary readers, as it should, because it calls on us to unpack this history that is still too persistent in mainstream contemporary science fiction where the aliens, and superpowered heroes and villains both, often draw on such weary tropes of difference.

Duffy rejects these utterly. If it is anything, Gor Saga is a story of nurture over nature, a refutation of rigidity, of all exclusion. Character after character – all except Forester – breaks the bounds of who they are told they should be, and how separate from each other they should remain. There is such a thing as society, and it is through Gor’s brilliantly-written gaze that we see our possibility of coming-together anew.

He never really knew his mother. He was taken away from her as soon as it became clear that to Mary the child was just another toy, to be cuddled and crooned over when that mood was on her but in danger of having his brains dashed out when he screamed or she simply became bored with him.

‘She doesn’t seem to have much maternal instinct, sir,’ Knott said.

‘I never thought she would.’ Forester knocked out his empty pipe in the palm of his hand. ‘Not Mary. She’s always been too self-centred.’

‘Mary want Micky,’ she signed at him now through the glass.

‘Who’s Micky?’

‘The cat, sir.’

Knott always sirred him. Secretly Forester found it easier to handle than the informality of Christian names, as he still mentally called them in his old-fashioned way, would have been. It allowed him to use ‘Knott’ as a kind of symbol and it fitted the man perfectly, his kind of negative durability, a tight-grained nodule turned in on itself.

‘Mary got baby,’ he signed back at her.

‘Baby no good. Baby dirty. Baby loud.’ She dangled it by an ankle with its head an inch from the cage floor. She had recognized his interest in it and the gesture was half in blackmail, half in jealousy.

Forester sighed. It would all be so much easier if the animals were less acute socially, less quick to pick up every emotional nuance, and to exploit their own moods as if they knew how expensive and irreplaceable they were. It had taken nine years to train Mary and now she had the temperament of the most difficult prima donna.

‘You’d better take it away. Though what to do with it …?’

‘The wife will have it, sir. She’s got nothing on hand at the moment.’

‘I’d be most grateful to Mrs Knott. You can indent for its upkeep as usual. Then we’ll see how it goes. Perhaps it won’t survive.’

Indeed it was in danger of a very early extinction. Mary was bumping it along the ground like a wheeled toy on a string.

‘Mary give me baby. I give Mary Micky.’

‘I’ll fetch the cat, sir.’

Forester and Mary stared each other down through the glass wall while Knott fetched the black and white cat in its carrier. Mary had learned by a combination of Micky’s own claws, sharp mother-of-pearl rose thorns, and the knowledge that he would be taken away from her if she was too rough with him, to treat the cat gently. Forester wished she could have felt the same about the child whose screams had subsided into a weary grizzle.

‘Its a chubby little thing,’ Knott said when they had made the substitution. ‘Not much hair either.’

‘Perhaps Mary’s been pulling it out.’

Knott shook his head. ‘Something not quite right with it. I’ll tell the wife not to get too attached to it in case it doesn’t live. Always dodgy, these externals.’

Forester kept down an impulse to snap. Knott was one of the old school that still liked everything to be as natural as possible even against the highly artificial nature of the Institute. Mary had firmly resisted all attempts to mate her. Bad mother, she had been a more than indifferent lover, driving off the wretched Jo-Jo, her selected husband, so often and fiercely that he eventually sat in a corner rocking himself in misery with his arms over his head.

Even artificial insemination had failed. Forester had felt a quickly suppressed tremor of excitement as he had pushed the inseminator between the bright pink buttocks which he’d expected to find repulsive, and pressed down the plunger. Perhaps it was the knowledge that Mary had always been a little in love with him, which was partly why she had treated Jo-Jo so badly, calling him ‘Dirty monkey’, that made Forester feel that she might have accepted his attentions even without the general anaesthetic Knott had given her. For a moment he had almost felt tenderness for the inert form.

The operation itself had been a failure. Mary’s body rejected the intruding sperm as she had rejected Jo-Jo. It gave Forester the legitimate chance to try an in vitro fertilization, replanting the fecund egg back in her body. This time the enveloping ­tissues accepted the stranger and carried it the full term before ejaculating it into the common day out of her warm blind dark. The birth had been hard and bloody and Mary had screamed with pain and rage. Once again she had been sedated while the torn flesh was stitched. No wonder the child was doubly unwelcome.

Knott had been his helper when he had taken the egg from her and again when he had put it back. He had watched as Forester had placed it in the culture dish of prepared clear liquid and added the droplets of cloudy seed, exuding a dis­approval as palpable as a film of sweat. ‘If she wanted to be an old maid why couldn’t she have been let,’ he argued later with his wife.

‘Perhaps she didn’t,’ she had said then. ‘After all, a lot of women have had children the same sort of way.’ But when she heard of Mary’s unmotherly behaviour she had been less sure. ‘Maybe you were right.’ She knew the conversation was really about their own childlessness and that they were walking on opposite sides of a crevasse with the tips of their fingers barely touching across the gap.

Now she looked at the down-darkened head on the blanket, at the bundle of a small body snuggled against the hot water bottle Knott had given it for comfort on the journey to their bungalow in the assistant’s quarters, and the thin pink fingers curled fiercely round one of her husband’s own, and felt a contraction, or an expansion, she couldn’t tell which, in her breasts.

‘I’ll make it a bottle.’

‘Don’t get too stuck on it, Nance; it mayn’t survive.’

‘If I could feed it myself …’

‘You couldn’t.’

‘I could. After all, you put cow’s milk in your tea. There’s no difference.’

‘What’s it to be called, sir?’ Knott had asked Forester and he had answered at once.

‘Gordon.’ Knott had entered it in the file with the date of birth, Mary’s name, the batch number of the sperm, and the infant’s weight.

‘Bring it back in a fortnight for a check-up if it lasts that long,’ Forester had said.

Nancy had once nursed an orphaned colobus monkey and in her own childhood she had helped with the motherless lambs her father sometimes brought in from the hills. Now she thrust the rubber teat between the red lips and watched the small hands grip on the bottle, and asked its name as her husband had done.

‘You’d better get it some clothes if it’s still alive in a day or two.’

‘It’ll need a nappy before then,’ she laughed, lifting up the blanket. ‘I didn’t know they were like this when they were little, so like a human I mean.’

‘See them before they’re born and they’re exactly like, at least the chimps are.’ Knott had been shocked one morning to find Sally crooning over her lifeless and miscarried baby. He had only been able to get it away from her after a day of grief when she was finally prepared to admit that it was dead.

‘Even so …’ Nancy looked doubtfully at the small dark pink limbs and dusky belly where the first hair had rubbed away in patches.

‘I see what you mean. Maybe it’ll get more normal as it gets older.’ The baby opened its mouth to belch, dropping the empty bottle and falling asleep all in one go.

‘That baby gorilla, sir,’ Knott said a few days later.

‘Oh yes, how’s it doing?’ Forester looked up carefully.

‘Fine. The wife sees to that. Proper spoils it. But it’s not that.’

‘Oh?’ Forester made the sound of traditional polite unconcern, keeping the file card he had been studying poised as if he had only a moment’s attention to spare.

‘Yes. I reckon it’s a bit of a freak.’

‘ “Freak” isn’t a very scientific term. Is there anything wrong with it?’

‘Well yes and no. It’s got all its bits and pieces. It’s just that it isn’t very like any baby chimp or gorilla I’ve ever had to do with.’

‘That’s interesting.’ Forester put down the card. ‘Perhaps we’ve got a mutation of some sort.’

‘Yes sir, that’s what I think.’

‘Well let’s hope Mrs Knott can keep it alive for us. Let me know how it goes on. I’d like you to keep a full record of development and I’ll come along and see it in a week or two.’ He had been afraid his hand might shake visibly as he picked up the card again in a gesture of dismissal. He wanted to shout and laugh and instead he had to stay absolutely calm and pretend to no more interest than Knott’s words would be expected to provoke in a person of his known character.

He had done it. While all the rest were speculating about the possibility he had quite simply pulled it off. Even the Russians who had been rumoured to have been trying since the early seventies hadn’t made it yet or word would have got out. He had been monitoring the journals very carefully and there had been no breath of success.

But he would keep it quiet for a while yet and there, when he had thought about the problem of secrecy, the Knotts had presented themselves as providing the perfect hide-out. Knott himself didn’t mix with the other attendants so there would be no gossip, and his wife was a proven nurse. Forester had to admit that Knott was sometimes right in his preference for the natural over the artificial. Primates throve best with living foster mothers if they couldn’t have their own. Kept in incubators, even though fed and warm and given a cloth figure to cling to, they pined mysteriously, almost perversely. Its best chance of survival was with Mrs Knott and the smother love she would give. He had manouevred carefully to bring this about.

He couldn’t tell yet, of course, what he had created. It might be mad, monstrous, sterile. He would watch and wait. Meanwhile he had taken out a patent on the chemical process he had disguised from Knott. It was the infant’s only birth certificate, Forester reflected. If it perished only Knott and his wife, apart from himself, would know it had ever been. The card could be removed from the file and destroyed. Mary’s antipathy for it would provide an explanation of its death.

Forester didn’t think that Gordon would die, not deep down in the marrow of his brain, although he tried to guard against disappointment by mentally crossing his fingers in doubt. When Knott had gone he sat on at the white plastic table that served him for a desk, waiting for his pulse to slow and the hum in his ears, as if his head was connected to his body only by a flow of energy, not flesh and bone, to die away. It was like his first lust for Ann over again.

Gor didn’t think that he would die either or at least his tissues didn’t. His brain wasn’t capable yet of thought. It responded automatically to the messages the senses brought it and made his mouth open in a yell when it received tokens of hunger or discomfort, wind or wet. He was a small world with its own weathers.

Nancy had clothed him now and the clothes had rubbed away more of the baby hair so that he was bald almost all over. Already his near black eyes followed her comings and goings and his hands grabbed at her clothes as she lifted him up. ‘You sure he’s a monkey?’ she asked Knott one evening.

‘Ape.’

‘Ape then.’

‘The professor says he could be a mutation.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Well, not quite right.’

The changeling looked up at them from his cot and at the slowly turning mobile of coloured plastic balls Nancy had hung above it.

‘He’s bright enough anyway. Them little boot-buttons follow me everywhere.’

‘Boot-buttons? Boots don’t have buttons.’

‘It’s a saying for eyes when they’re sharp and round and bright like his.’

Nancy ha. . .