Strange Germs and Hopeful Monsters

I In July of 1934, an American mystery novel by Alexander Laing titled The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck became an unexpected sensation, selling out its first edition by the time of publication and climbing the best-seller charts over the next several months. A hybrid of science fiction, horror, and hard-boiled detective tale, Wyck riveted readers and critics with its ghoulish subject matter—including abortions, babies born with fused lower limbs, an epileptic murderer, and a woman driven mad by sadistic research experiments. Wyck was, in fact, so gory and bizarre that the novel's book jacket warned that "people unable to sustain violent shock (should) read this book on their own responsibility," and subsequent editions of the book abridged some of its extreme passages.1 Eighteen months later, Laing published another novel just as peculiar (if not as commercially successful) as its predecessor, The Motives of Nicholas Holtz, Or, The Weird Tale of the Ironville Virus. In this bioterror thriller, which nowadays seems decades ahead of its time, a munitions magnate tries to weaponize a lethal virus that is created by a scientist bent on the spontaneous generation of life from inorganic matter. Seventy-odd years after they were published, Laing's two novels are obscure curiosities, rarely available in libraries and unknown to all but a few horror buffs and historians of medicine. This is because Wyck and Holtz do not fit neatly into the stories we tell about the relationship between literature, medicine, and technology in the twentieth century: they are not clearly classifiable as "science fiction," and they fall outside of the purview of literary scholars and those in the field of medical humanities. Their obscurity is unfortunate, as these novels are arguably just as relevant to any discussion of American "biotech fiction" as works such as Greg Bear's Darwin's Radio or Michael Crichton's Terminal Man. Deeply engaged with the science of their time, they can help us to chart out the prehistory of what we now think of as the biotechnology [End Page 247] industry: the moment when new technologies of life manipulation generated utopian speculation as well as deep anxiety about their possible misuse. In what follows, I use the Laing novels to argue that in order to better understand contemporary fiction engaged with biotechnology, we need to expand our gaze to include popular texts that might have been lost in the process of literary history-making. Reading Holtz and Wyck can jolt us out of some of the presentism that informs our discussion of biotechnology: the novels serve as a reminder that the story of the messy collision of science, industry, and the human subject is hardly a late-twentieth-century invention. II Scholars of American literature have combed through the first several decades of the twentieth century to find fiction that thematizes medical research or medical technology—and, for the most part, they have come up relatively empty handed. Unless we count Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith, no American novel about the technology of medicine has garnered the same critical attention as British texts such as H. G. Wells's The Island of Dr. Moreau or Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. I would argue, however, that this paucity of examples probably has more to do with the fallacies of generic categorization than it does with actual scarcity of material. Seduced by the intellectual pleasures of British science fiction, critics look back at American science fiction from the same period and find—disappointingly—tales of space adventure. Seeking to explain the absence of an American Huxley, some have gone as far as suggesting that medicine was simply not an interesting topic. For example, in his introduction to the collection No Cure for the Future: Disease and Medicine in Science Fiction and Fantasy, Gary Westfahl writes: At the very time when science fiction was emerging as a distinguished genre in the

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