{"id":9710,"date":"2017-10-05T07:45:15","date_gmt":"2017-10-05T15:45:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/2017\/10\/05\/news-3483\/"},"modified":"2017-10-05T07:45:15","modified_gmt":"2017-10-05T15:45:15","slug":"news-3483","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/2017\/10\/05\/news-3483\/","title":{"rendered":"Nobel Winner Kazuo Ishiguro’s \u2018Never Let Me Go\u2019 Predicted the Gene Editing Debate"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Credit to Author: Ben Richmond| Date: Thu, 05 Oct 2017 15:29:03 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n

Kazuo Ishiguro is a Silicon Valley skeptic, a science fiction writer who publicly pissed off Ursula Le Guin<\/a> and, as of this morning, a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.<\/p>\n

In a news release announcing the decision, the Swedish Academy praised<\/a> Ishiguro’s “novels of great emotional force,” which have “uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.” In his 2005 novel Never Let Me Go<\/i>, Ishiguro examined how science, specifically genetic engineering, could shake the foundations of our society, asking how the world will look when we are no longer born as equals.<\/p>\n

To my mind, Ishiguro is a master of the reveal, so if you haven’t heard anything about Never Let Me Go, <\/i>or the 2011 film based on Ishiguro’s book, you have my permission to go get it, read it in its entirety, and finish this article later. On to the spoiling.<\/p>\n

Read More: <\/i> <\/b> We Risk Programming Inequality into Our DNA<\/a><\/i> <\/b> <\/p>\n

Never Let Me Go<\/i> is like Blade Runner<\/i> set in the British boarding school that’s the furthest from Hogwarts imaginable. Instead of discovering that they’re secretly better than all the Muggles around them, the students don’t even breach the status of “people.” They’re clones who exist only to donate their organs\u2014unto death\u2014to an “original” they’ll never meet. This is their whole purpose and they’re never told otherwise, which is how, even though the story is told in the first person, the reveal to the reader is slow and sort of detached, considering the stakes.<\/p>\n

Like the characters in Brave New World<\/i>‘s tiered society , <\/i>the narrator never knew life to be otherwise; she never had reason to believe it should be. When you see Ishiguro compared to Kafka, I think this is what is meant: the bureaucratic fact of it all, the “it has always been so” almost<\/i> papers over the devastation.<\/p>\n

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