SG Interview: Laurence Gonzales0

Sure.

It’s speculative fiction. I’ve done a lot of research about global warming and written a lot of non-fiction, and I had this idea that I would write something. So, I did all this research and then two things happened: I got the impression that people were just saturated. They’d made up their minds and were not listening anymore. They either thought it was a problem or they thought it wasn’t, but you couldn’t really say anything that they hadn’t already heard, or at least thought they’d heard. The second thing was that every time I’d come across something that was saying ‘This might happen in thirty years’ I’d turn around and see the news saying that it was already happening. So, things were happening a lot faster than anyone thought and no one was listening and I was struggling with this idea, which was: How do you approach the subject of global warming? And I have a seven year old son, so I thought ‘I wonder what the world will be like when he’s my age.’ I’m 62. So, I thought ‘Okay, what if we just jump over all of this and say that everything they think is going to happen has happened. What does the world look like? What is life like for someone who would have been in kindergarten or first grade right now?’ And that’s essentially what I’m writing about.

There’s some pessimism in Lucy about how we’re doing as a species and where we’re headed, as I see it. You seem to suggest that humans don’t have what it takes to make it in the long haul, and all that can save us is a sort of radical genetic intervention, a deus ex machina that alters our evolution. Although admittedly, that’s the point of view of one character, Lucy’s father.

You have to read Lucy’s father as a bit of a mad scientist. Nobody would do this, otherwise. His theories about why he would do it are his own, not mine. And I wanted to get past all of that, because the main thrust of the story is: What if you had such a person? Forget about how she got here. What would happen if such a person existed? How would the world react? I think that’s the main interest of the story. So, I don’t feel that. When I read the news about what’s happening around the world in various places I can certainly get pessimistic, don’t get me wrong, but I certainly don’t think that genetically engineering a new race of people is the answer. What I think is that people basically respond to pleasure and pain. If something works and gives them pleasure they do it again and again and again, like those guys on Wall Street with the mortgage default swaps. Those seemed like such a great idea because it was a money machine, until it wasn’t. And people respond equally to pain. If something is going really wrong, they tend to correct it eventually, it’s just a question of how much pain they have to be in first. During the energy crisis of the 1970s people actually cut back on their driving so much – because the cost of gas had become so high – that if it had gone on for another year we would have been completely independent of foreign oil. Most people don’t remember that, but we actually did do the right thing. Doing the right thing is always possible, it’s just a question of whether we’ll do it in time.

I read somewhere that you’ve actually visited prisons to study inmates. Did that affect your view of human potential at all?

Well, at the time I went there I was writing about a number of different kinds of institutions. I spent a lot of time in a mental hospital too. And the idea behind it was that I wanted to show people something they probably would not see themselves. Prison is one of the great institutions of this country. We have more people in prison per capita than any other country in the world, and while that’s a shocking and awful thing, there are certainly people who belong there. There are just an awful lot of people in there, and I don’t think people understand what the conditions are. So, the idea wasn’t so much a comment on our humanity as much as an exploration of a piece of our culture that most people know nothing about. And the thing about the mental institution was that there really is no effective treatment for serious mental illness and these institutions, well, they do what they can, I guess, but that’s another thing where people don’t just walk in and take a look at their local mental institution.

There’s a rather insane character in Lucy, a government veterinarian who captures Lucy at one point and experiments on her with no ethical qualms. As someone who has written extensively about survival and what kind of person is a survivor type, do you think that fundamentalists are survivors?

Yes, I do think that. As my model for the veterinarian I read a book called The Banality of Evil about the Eichmann trial. Eichmann was the mastermind of Hitler’s death machine, but he was essentially a bland bureaucrat who just figured out an efficient way to do things, namely recordkeeping and moving logistical things around. And he was tried and executed for killing all these people, even though he never actually killed anybody. He just did these mechanistic things that got the job done. And that’s kind of what this guy [in the book] is like: very low affect, not subject to emotional pleas. There are people like that in any society and, yeah, they do tend to survive, which is not such a good thing.

I noticed that you don’t really do the Michael Crichton thing in this book of overwhelming us with data to make an airtight scientific case. Is there plausibility in the book’s premise?

There is plausibility in the premise. I don’t know if you noticed, but Arizona just passed a law that goes into effect this week that would make it a felony to create Lucy. It’s a law against creating human-animal hybrids. Several other states have made similar laws and the reason these laws are appearing now is because it is becoming possible to do this sort of thing. Now, I didn’t think for the purposes of the narrative that it would be very interesting to go through all of the possible genetic mechanisms by which you could create a human-animal hybrid – it’s very complex stuff. But yeah, it is possible, but the question of what you would get is an open question. As far as I know, no one has tried it. I took the Frankenstein idea and turned it on its head. Creating a monster that’s bad is one way of doing a story, but creating a monster that is unequivocally good poses a whole new set of problems that I hadn’t seen examined very much. Everybody likes Lucy, but she’s got this weird genetic picture, so what do you do with that? It would be a different thing if she were roaming the countryside killing people – that would make it much simpler.

Do you have a position on the morality of experimenting with human-animal hybrids?

Well, in writing the novel my impulse to deal with that subject matter was to get people talking about it before we’re actually faced with it. I wanted to open the discussion, to say ‘Here’s this stuff and it’s out there, now what are we going to do about it before some high-school student in China actually does it?’ That’s probably what will happen. You can get biotechnology kits right now. You can get the components free from MIT, they have a library of genetic elements called BioBricks. And there’s a company that will sell you a kit for assembling these for $235. So, anybody can start doing genetic engineering. It’s kind of like the computer revolution in 1971. I’m essentially an observer, not a philosopher, and as an observer I think people are going to start doing this stuff. Not necessarily creating a Lucy character, but creating elements of genetic systems that combine human and animal genetic material. For example, you can grow human organs, conceivably, in a pig. So, we take your genetic material and implant it in a pig through all of these genetic techniques and you can conceivably get your transplant kidney grown in an animal. I think that’s probably the direction we will go, initially.

Just to go back to the philosophical side for a second, do you generally take the Peter Singer position that animals like chimpanzees are entitled to right to life and protection from harm?

Yes. I believe that great apes, which would include chimpanzees and bonobos, should not be used for experimentation. Ideally, they should not be put in cages, but what are you gonna do? They are many, many of them in cages and you can’t repatriate them to the jungle because they’d die there. They’re not used to that if they were born in captivity. So, treating them as well as possible in whatever setting you find them is certainly my position.

They say that bonobos can recognize themselves in a mirror, which is supposedly a key criterion of self-awareness.

It goes way beyond that. They’re so smart that if you spend time with them you’ll immediately recognize how close to us they are. I went the other day to the Milwaukee Zoo, where they have the largest captive group of bonobos. I hadn’t been there in about two years, but while I was doing research for this novel I had gotten to know a bonobo there called Viaje, and he was from Mexico. He had been a captive bonobo in Mexico all his life – he’s 24 years old – and no one had ever spoken Spanish to him. I spoke Spanish to him and when I did his head snapped around in recognition and he came right over to me. It was clear that he was like ‘Finally, somebody who can talk!’ He had been hearing only English since he came to the United States. Well, that was two years ago and I came the other day to have a photo shoot done there and as soon as I came near the cage he came up to the glass and started pounding on the glass. And during the whole photo shoot I was close to the glass and he sat right next to me. Wherever I moved, he moved over to be next to me – he clearly knew who I was. He’s a smart guy.

There are some interesting digressions in the book where you remind people that as bright as chimpanzees are, they also occasionally leave people horribly maimed or dead. Do you take the Werner Herzog position that it’s naïve to forget that they are still animals at heart?

Yes, it is naïve and dangerous as well. Bonobos are not as violent as chimps, but they will hurt you just like they hurt each other. They do fight. Chimpanzees are notoriously violent animals and extremely dangerous to humans. The usual scenario is that someone gets a chimp as an infant – they’re very attractive as infants – but as they reach maturity the males especially become quite dangerous. People will find at that time that if they don’t have them placed somewhere they will eventually attack someone. So, yeah, they are definitely animals and definitely dangerous.

As the book goes on, Lucy starts to embrace her animal side, her violent side, more casually. She starts biting off fingers at the first provocation.

Well, what happens is that Lucy is fine if she’s left alone. Once she’s attacked, she defends herself. When she is attacked, her violent side comes out, but I think we should bear in mind that this violent side is something we as humans possess too. Most people are capable of being violent when threatened and also of being much stronger than they are normally.

Lucy doesn’t always wait for a threat to be verbalized, because she has a very heightened awareness of nonverbal communication. That’s a big feature in the book.

I did a lot of research on nonverbal communication and it’s a real thing. It’s a formal area of study in science and I think it’s something that people ignore to their detriment. There are a lot of professions in which you’re forced to rely on the type of communication that Lucy refers to as The Stream – a constant stream of messages that don’t involve words, which all animals exchange all the time. For example, police officers, firefighters, people in hazardous professions – they learn to recognize these signals because their lives depend on them. Most of us don’t need to because we live in a protected environment, but Lucy was raised in the jungle and is very much attuned to that. Throughout the book she is constantly reading The Stream and I think it helps drive the story.

You said it’s a scientific discipline? Does it involve trying to prove the existence of telepathy?

No, there’s a fellow named Paul Ekman who sort of pioneered a study where he took high-speed video of people to show what he referred to as micro-expressions that send signals. A person can be seeming to talk to you in a friendly, normal way, but embedded in that in increments that are too small to recognize consciously are micro-expressions where someone might grimace, for example, when it looks like he’s smiling. People are able to process that through their emotional system and receive those messages, but they don’t hit the level of consciousness because they’re too quick. I could give you the whole neuro-scientific rundown, but it goes through the amygdale, which is a very fast route, instead of going through the normal visual cortex which produces a clearer picture. But anyway, Ekman was one of the pioneers of this. It’s not considered telepathy at all; it involves things like body language, micro-expressions of the face, and pheromones, which you can’t consciously smell, but they send signals. So, in these ways people are constantly exchanging information without knowing it. You may yourself recognize this if you meet someone and the person makes you really uncomfortable, but you don’t know why. It’s probably some set of signals this person is sending. Also, if you see two young people who are attracted to one another in a bar on a date, and they’re hitting it off, watch them carefully and you’ll see that they start to mimic each other. They’ll start to synchronize their body movements and sort of mirror each other, even to the point of taking their drinks at the same time or folding their arms at the same time, and they’ll gradually even synchronize their blood pressure and heart rate. There’ve been a series of experiments done showing how this works.

It’s interesting how in the book Lucy’s education seems to come from everywhere but school. Her father taught her abstract thinking, and she has all these strategies for dealing with things.

Well, I never learned anything in school, did you? [laughs] I always think of that Paul Simon song about high-school: When I think back to all the crap I learned in high-school, it’s a wonder I can think at all. I’m being facetious of course, but her father was intensely educating her and she knew more by the time she got to high-school than she would have learned in high-school, so that becomes a non-starter. She was planning on going straight to college. She is a character of superior intelligence, and is meant to be special in that way. And because she’s unfamiliar with technology she thinks of things that people who use those technologies every day of their lives might not think of. She’s a very creative individual. But the only critique of high school I was making was that it really isn’t a place of learning, it’s a place for socialization.

You describe Lucy as “exotic” in the book a few times, but you never really commit to describing her in detail. Do you have an image of her in your mind?

I think I do have an image in my mind, but it’s sort of a vague image. I think I purposefully kept it a little vague, because people tend to create images for characters in books in their own minds and you don’t want to step on that too much. A lot of the fun of reading is what the reader brings to the subject, so rather than give a very detailed description of her I left it a bit sketchy. I think people will jump at the opportunity of adding their own thoughts. When you say to someone: What would you get if you crossed an ape and a human, they’ll come up with something.

We have to think about the movie, though, right?

Here’s what I think about the casting process: it doesn’t really matter what Lucy looks like as long as she’s pleasant-looking. But when the movie is made, somebody completely unknown will probably play Lucy. Or at least, that’s how I imagine it.

After the novel you’re currently writing is done, do you plan to write more about survival? Is there anything new to say on the subject?