Title: Birth Days
Author: Geoff Ryman
Date of First Publication: April 2003
Place of Publication: Interzone, ed. David Pringle
Bibliographic Reference: isfdb
Type: Short story
Themes: QUEER; POSTHUMAN; SYMPATHETIC MONSTER
Critical Summary: Ryman follows the main character, Ronald Flannery, celebrating his birthday over the span of 30 years, with each decade highlighting a different milestone and approach to his homosexuality. “Samesex” as Ron refers to it, is initially seen a biological disadvantage to “NeoChristians” like his mother. Ron’s mother voices familiar “reproductivist” critiques of homosexuality such as, “But you gotta wonder, why is there a gene like that in the first place?”
As Ron grows up, more is revealed about the cultural attitudes towards samesex. Embryo-screening is a service that informs expectant parents of the presence of samesex genes in their foetuses so that they can abort their pregnancy. At 26, Ron is in love with Joao (his fellow ‘endangered species’ of samesex) and living in the Amazon. His work as a scientist at Lumiere Laboratories is towards finding a “cure” for homosexuality by altering the genes in babies before they are born, so that they grow up to be heterosexual-reproducing members of society. In the lab, the scientists are working on a bacterial culture called Flat Man that performs physical functions but is incapable of autonomy. Ron immediately decides he will use Flat Man to trace the genetic samesex markers and develop a scientific cure for homosexuality. He sees the cure as a free choice for samesex individuals, they can decide if they want to live with harassment and discrimination, or they can decide if they want “go hetero.”
By age 36, Ron has become the first pregnant man. His work on Flat Man led to further experimentation in combining sperm and chromosomes from two men to create life growing in a man’s bowels. The pregnancy is met with scepticism and fear from his mother and Evangelicals. The Indians that live in the territory of Eden in the Amazon however, greet the pregnancy as an omen to an ancient story of the world’s rebirth. Ten years and fifteen children later (between him and his partner), Ron suffers a miscarriage on his 46th birthday and finally decides to stop reproducing. Over conversations with his attending doctor Nadia, Ryman offers up the story’s original question, “People used to wonder what reproductive advantage homosexuality conferred” and considers it as a back-up reproductive system. One that allows both partners to reproduce and so, conferring a comeptative genetic advantage. Even a small advantage, over time, changes the world: that’s evolution. The world has begun to shift.
In terms of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, Ronald Flannery and Victor Frankenstein are obvious and simultaneously unlikely parallels; as is Victor’s Creature. Ron is outcast monster and the scientists who makes life. Both scientists have to answer to society for the “unnaturalness” of how they created life. Victor’s commonly referred to “God Complex” makes an appearance in Ryman’s story as NeoChristians and later even Ron preach about the role of Science as God, to calm society’s fear of the future.
The motives for Ron and Victor are very different. Both are similarly motivated by curiosity, but Ron’s experiment is compounded by the need to save samesex people from the genocide of Embryo-screening. In addition, Ron’s experiment to create male/male reproduction uncovers the answer to why and what homosexuals contribute to the society Ryman describes. While the stakes are different, both characters fundamentally redefine the role of their prescribed genders by giving birth. The intelligence and science the enables Victor to bring the dead to life, and Ron to enable men to reproduce with each other, is the weapon to combat their fear of death-whether personal or that of an entire community.
Administrative Notes: Sophia Sotelo