“One morning in the late seventies,” writes Kathryn Lance,  “I saw a short squib in the New York Times business section about a company that was working to genetically alter bacteria that naturally consume oil so that they might be used to clean up oil spills. I thought, ‘Great! But what if your car catches it?’  This idea germinated for a while and became the nucleus of the setting for Pandora’s Genes and Pandora’s Children, post-holocaust adventure novels set in the late 21st century. In the world I came to imagine, genetically engineered bacteria were used on a particularly severe oil spill, and mutated to develop a taste for all petroleum products. The new bacteria spread rapidly, destroying the functionality of all machinery that runs on oil products, as well as all things containing plastic and other petro-based items.”

In Pandora’s Genes, an absorbing and unique novel, Kathryn Lance asks how far the folly of mankind can go, how much science can be substituted for nature before the imbalance proves disastrous. In a world of the future, great machines lie rusting as their fuel has finally run out and humanity faces the possibility of extinction as altered strands of DNA run rampant through the gene pool. Several forces emerge, each hoping to be humanity’s saving grace, but which one will ultimately save the world?

E-Reads has published Pandora’s Genes and its sequel Pandora’s Children at a time when the world Lance projected – after a fictional holocaust – may be creating itself before our very eyes.

We asked Kathryn Lance to write some remarks tying her books to the oil spill now disgorging its horrifying contents into the Gulf of Mexico. You can read them in full here.

RC