TW for discussions of murder, suicide, reproductive health, infertility, human trafficking, and eugenics.
For thousands of years, very possibly for as long as humans have existed, people have been worried about “the end.” In both religious and scientific circles, the idea that one day we won’t exist remains a hot topic of discussion; for some, the idea that our species’ existence is finite is a source of fear or existential dread, while for others, this comes as a comfort.
But what might happen if we knew the expiration date? How would that impact our lives and the way we live them? Would we do something to try to stop the end from happening, or would we welcome it?
Author Lauren Stienstra attempts to answer these questions in her debut novel, The Beauty of the End.
In Stienstra’s novel, humanity realizes its impending extinction in an unexpected way: the cicadas don’t emerge when they’re scheduled to. In fact, they don’t emerge at all, which prompts entomologists to start digging—literally—and they find that the previous generation of cicadas did not lay any eggs before they died. The entomologists then up all their fellow biologist buddies and begin investigating other extinct and endangered species, and ultimately discover something in every living thing’s DNA (don’t ask me what; I’m not a scientist, but Stienstra is, and this is science fiction, so I suspended disbelief and took her word for it) that can approximate about how many generations a species or individual has left in their genetic line.
Humans, it turns out, have only about four generations left before the species dies out. Some individuals or families may have more or fewer generations left. While four is the average, some people may naturally score a five or even a six on their genetic report, while others can score three, two, one, or even zero. With each generation, that number goes down, and fewer people are born, which leads to some interesting changes to the society which emerges in this universe.
Women are encouraged to have babies later (in their 40s or 50s if possible), or, if they can’t wait, to have a lot of babies, preferably with multiple fathers so as to “diversify the gene pool.” If you are a young woman who doesn’t want to have children but still wants to help, you have the option to become a “Mendel,” a doctor who specializes in genetics and reproduction, named for Gregor Mendel, the father of genetics. People who score higher in their generational genetic testing are preferred, both as Mendels and as sexual partners, especially since it seems that reproducing individuals with lower scores tend to have greater likelihood of passing their scores on to their offspring (for instance, if you are a 2, and you have a child with a 5, despite your partner’s high score, your children will almost certainly score a 1, meaning they can have children, but their children will not be able to have children). People unlucky enough to score zero become known as “naughts” and are inevitably looked down upon for their inability to reproduce naturally.
People are desperate to find a way to stop the “Limit” as that four-generation expiration date comes to be known, and from that desperation come great atrocities. Human trafficking runs rampant. Women are kidnapped and sold. Men rent their wives out to be used like breeding stock. The government gives scientists almost complete autonomy to experiment as they wish, which leads to the discovery that, sometimes, people with disabilities or terrible genetic illnesses can produce children who score as high as 12, which, in turn, leads to more of the aforementioned atrocities, now specifically targeting people with these diagnoses. Families fall apart. People kill their partners and children. Mass suicides abound.
If you think that all sounds pretty awful, I would agree with you!
And so, it seems, would the narrator of this story, Dr. Charlie Tannehill, a young woman who agreed to become a Mendel not out of a desire to help stop the Limit, but to continue to live a life as close to the one she believes she would have had if the Limit had never been discovered. Goods have become so expensive, and the social expectation for women to reproduce is stronger than ever, so she sees becoming a Mendel as a way to both continue to afford food and the ability to live as a single woman, and to not have to reproduce. Because the Mendelia, the organization that trains Mendels, takes your ovaries when you join in lieu of tuition.
Over time, however, as she witnesses the horrors endured by her patients at the hands of her colleagues, and the way her sister and brother-in-law's lives are destroyed by their and the Mendelia’s ambition, she begins to fight back against what society has become.
This book was pretty heavy in terms of content, but I thought it was a fascinating thought experiment and I enjoyed the speculative aspect of it because it seemed like something that could potentially happen. The last couple of chapters really lost me, but I think that had more to do with my personal preferences than anything to do with the way it was written. I would definitely recommend this one to any fan of speculative science fiction.