As part of his research for his futuristic new novel, The Seventh Son, Sebastian Faulks visited a fertility clinic in London. “I spoke to several embryologists, and at one point they let me operate the tube that fires the tadpole into the egg,” he tells me with a smile. “It wasn’t loaded when I used it, obviously. But I was able to twiddle the knobs and look through the microscope and see exactly what was going on.”
A “tadpole” is indeed fired into a woman’s egg in The Seventh Son, the 16th novel from one of our best-loved literary figures, whose 1993 novel Birdsong has sold more than 3 million copies. However, it’s not a human tadpole as we generally understand the term human to mean, but one produced entirely from Neanderthal DNA. The novel begins in 2030, and follows a couple who are undergoing fertility treatment. They are unaware that the resulting child, whom they name Seth, is the product of a deliberately manipulated sample.
