Throwback Thursday: The Mad Scientist’s Daughter Is Romantic Science Fiction with a Capital R

When I was in junior high, I knew this girl who claimed to be a “test tube baby,” which is what we once called children conceived through the now commonplace method of in vitro fertilization. My friend claimed a lot of fantastic things—I recall she said that she had no sense of smell because of the scientific tinkering of her experimental origins. I pretty much knew this was blarney, but this was back before I could spend 5 seconds querying a device everyone insists on calling a phone, despite the fact it’s so much more: “first test tube baby US.” That magic would deliver me the name of Elizabeth Jordan Carr, who came into the world on December 28, 1981, several years after my classmate and I were born. We were never close or anything, but I let all this slide.
Even with my somewhat flimsy adolescent financial sense, I knew how much closer to the edge she was. She and her mom lived above a corner grocery, the kind that sells Campbell’s soup for double its price, cigarettes, and lotto tickets. Her family didn’t have a phone, but used the pay phone on the corner. They weren’t the only ones, and there was a complicated set of protocols to be followed when you called it. (True fact: pay phones used to exist, and they used to accept incoming calls. Also, there were no cell phones.) I knew what she said was embroidered, but I got why she was running that line of bunk: the science-fictional aspects of her supposed conception added a shine of melodrama to her impoverished upbringing.
This was long enough ago that the concept of “test tube babies” came with an op-ed’s worth of hand-wringing. You could still run the false-Darwinian line about in vitro fertilization violating the spirit, if maybe not the letter, of survival of the fittest—never mind the more theological objections—and you do so without hitting millions of children who have been conceived this way since. (I know at least a half dozen.) I suppose I could argue against the fact of the children of my friends and family, braying that they shouldn’t exist, but this would be both futile and cruel. At a certain point, that crystalline logical scaffolding teeters and collapses into hard core gut-reaction and interpersonal connection. The argument must change to account for who we are now. The djinn was made to escape the bottle; that’s what it does.
In The Mad Scientist’s Daughter, a girl named Catarina is five years old the day her father returns home with an android named Finn. Finn is the first of his kind, a wonderful decanting of consciousness into something other than biological form. Cat is a child, so she doesn’t quite grasp what Finn’s extraordinary existence might mean. There have been automata and AI in this scorched, rebuilding world before, but Finn is unique—more and less human than anything that came before. She decides Finn is a ghost, because that makes sense to five. He acts as tutor to her as she grows up, and the world and its ethical understanding changes around them as they change.
I don’t want to get into the mechanics of the plot, because I’m not sure concrete action says anything about the long tides of lived lives. Cat grows; she goes to school; she marries. Those are just facts. But about halfway through, I sat up on the couch and said to my husband, this is so sad, I’m not sure I can take it. I spend the next half of the book near-weeping, and, if I’m going to be honest, weeping. Partly because, on a very overt level, this is an unrequited love story; mine was an emotional response to intrusive technology. The cultural and technological surface is less important than the cracking of the ice, and the fall into the personal.
I was very careful in the last paragraph not to use the word romance in relation to Finn and Cat, which I think belies in me a certain discomfort with love, sex, and the domestic in fiction. Certainly, the term applies in many ways, though more in its capital-R incarnation: the Romance. Romanticism attempted to inject strong emotion into the bloody warfare of Classicism, valued folk art as authentic craft, got its rocks off on rocks, trees, and landscape. That’s all in here: a brooding, personal recollection of the world after ecological disaster, with an eye towards the beauty of that devastation; the folk art of weaving that Cat takes up, confusing her scientist parents, and on some level, herself; the near-Gothic, near-Freudian setting of the family home, with the father in the basement and the android in the aerie. The opening section, with Cat catching fireflies in a jar, was almost too much for me—such vividly worn shorthand for wonder—but I promise, it works long term.

At some point, Clarke tips her hat to writers Kazuo Ishiguro and Maureen F. McHugh, and I smiled at the reference. We’re at the edge of science fiction here, bleeding into the literary (which is not to imply that one genre is more valorous than the other, but more that they have different registers.) Ishiguro’s clones, McHugh’s chimera, Atwood’s genetic engineering, Whitehead’s zombies, Boudinot’s Age of F.U.S.—these creatures and stories teeter on the strange edge of the science fictional and the literary, one or the other or both in a quantum uncertainty. Clarke is writing at the edges of things, just out of the corner of your eye.
But The Mad Scientist’s Daughter also a romance. It is about love. It is about love in the most collapsingly personal way imaginable. God, and it’s so, so sad.
The literary and the science fictional have been doing a dance at least since New Wave, running the ethics of technology against our humanity, and the inherent surrealism of such a project, into a martial art of “which part of the bookstore to shelve such a thing.” Add in romance—the stories of love and the childhood bedroom, of uneasy marriages and disappointed parents—and the dance becomes something…maybe not new, but old. This is an old story of parents and children managing the scientific intrusions that any society deals with. I thank the wide blue heavens I didn’t have to navigate an adolescence with social media; may my children make it out alive.
One of the many things about this story that clove me was the way I completely empathized with both parent and child, feeling the hard shocks of understanding when Cat’s mother snaps at Cat’s choices—I wasn’t built to be a housewife; no girl is—while bleeding for the casual judgement. The way we who have lived through gigantic technological upheavals (and that is all of us) navigate the messy questions of consciousness and emotion in new, mediated ways.
This book takes a cell phone and calls that payphone on the corner. Who answers will break your heart.
Or, in any case, it broke mine.
The Mad Scientist’s Daughter is available now, again, from Saga Press.