Background on Pandora’s Genes and Pandora’s Children.

One morning in the late seventies 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. Among the things destroyed were the fail-safe seals that confined other recombinant-DNA experiments, as well as deadly viruses being engineered in secret germ-warfare research. The result was a greatly de-populated world, with many animal and insect species extinct or deleteriously altered, and with no remnants of what we consider modern technology.

One of the engineered diseases let loose was an inheritable illness in which affected women die in childbirth, usually upon having a second female child. The resulting rarity of women is the plot point that sets my story in motion. Both novels focus on two opposed groups, one which wishes to restore some semblance of civilization, and their antagonists, a fanatical religious group dedicated to the final, total eradication of all remnants of “science” and the “wild deenas” (DNA) that science loosed on the world. (They make the sacred sign of the double spiral in their rites.)

When the current Gulf of Mexico oil disaster occurred, and I read that one of the possible solutions was oil-eating bacteria, I must admit to a little chill of déjà-vu. I hope whatever is tried ultimately works, but I can’t help wondering what will happen if the experts begin using engineered bacteria on a large scale, and what other parts of my books might then come true.
Kathryn Lance is the author or ghost of more than fifty books of fiction and nonfiction, for children and adults, as well as countless articles. Her most recent sci-fi publication, in the December, 2008 Asimov’s, was “Welcome to Valhalla,” co-written with Jack McDevitt.