Your new novel, The Seventh Son, begins with an experiment at an IVF clinic that stretches the bounds of scientific knowledge and ethics. What inspired you to address this subject?
It’s something that’s been kicking around in my mind since I wrote Human Traces, when I did a lot of research into genetics and evolution and the roots of mental illness. Then it was discovered in about 2010 that most people in the world have a degree of Neanderthal in our genome. I found it rather thrilling. And then about three years ago, I read a tweet by Richard Dawkins, imagining some kind of genetic engineering experiment. And I thought, maybe that could be the basis of a story.
The Seventh Son explores what it means to be human, and what we are capable of as a species. Do you think we are now at a crucial point in history?
The older you get, the more you read that we’re at “a time of unprecedented this or that”. Of course, there was always a precedent. But clearly there are very big scientific developments, including the discovery of new species of human ancestor. I’d hope that it makes people have a better understanding of the relatively insignificant part that modern humans have to play in the world, and the fact that we are just a very random endpoint of the human genus. It could so easily have been otherwise. The last remaining human species needn’t have been so extreme and so violent, and indeed so clever as we are. And I think it would be a good idea if we had a little more understanding of what a particularly freakish species we are and the responsibilities that come with that. The Neanderthals lasted about 300,000 years and I don’t think we’ll make that. We’ll destroy the world before then.
