Designer Babies: Difference between revisions

* An early example is ''[[Brave New World (novel)|Brave New World]]'' by Aldous Huxley, making it [[Older Than Television]]. Babies are "grown" here too (and "decanted" rather than "born"), though this was before the development of modern genetics, so they must resort to more complicated and organic means than flipping genetic switches to create their hereditary castes.

* [[Utopia]] Example: ''Herland'', by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The titular land is a [[Mary Suetopia|utopia]] because it is inhabited ''only'' by women, who can reproduce parthenogenically (without a male), and without genetic diversity/contamination, only pass amiable, peaceful, and otherwise perfect (boring) personality genes onto their offspring.

* Another 'utopian' example, is the city of Diaspar, the last bastion of humanity, in Arthur C. Clarke's ''Against the Fall of Night''/''The City and the Stars'', where humanity appears to have given up on sexual reproduction, in favour of an unimaginably massive database of personalities. Whenever a new person is to be born, a personality is downloaded into a created body, and assigned a couple to be its parents. When a person dies, they may choose what memories of theirs will be carried into their next incarnation, which may be ''millennia'' in the future, such is the size of the database, and those memories will become available to their new incarnation once it becomes an adult and has developed a truly unique personality through its childhood. 'Uniques', personalities seemingly generated during the creation process, do occur, but are viewed either as a wonderful accident, one of many little tricks to prevent stagnation, or as some great and possibly subversive plan by Diaspar's architects. Of course, {{spoiler|later on it turns out that there is a second remaining pocket of humanity, Lys, where humans have chosen to be born naturally, and die without the assurance of artificial reincarnation, living an Agrarian lifestyle and having over time developed empathic capabilities. Interestingly however, neither is presented as 'right', rather, as two distinct, viable versions of utopia. The part the book presents as ''wrong'' is the two cultures decision to totally isolate themselves from one another.}}

* In [[Woman On The Edge Of Time]], this is how the [[Mary Suetopia]] society reproduces. It's all but stated that this is a necessary sacrifice to eliminate the last vestige of gender discrimination. On the upside, a child is not only raised by the whole village, but get three parents to look after and nurture it. The society also tends to be a [[Free-Love Future]].

* In the ''[[Star Trek]]'' franchise, Earth suffers a terrible series of Eugenics Wars in the [[Twenty Minutes Into the Future|near future]] between normal humans and genetic "augments." By the logic that "superior ability breeds superior ambition," these young [[ubermensch]] all tend to suffer a [[Take Over the World|Napoleon complex,]] leading them to war not just with mankind, but with each other. Humanity wins, with the lasting result that [[No Transhumanism Allowed|genetic engineering of human beings is outlawed and held in universal contempt for centuries afterward.]] The two most well known augments in Trek are Kirk's archnemesis Khan Noonien Singh; and [[Deep Space Nine]]'s doctor Julian Bashir, who was augmented illegally.

* In ''[[Century City]]'', a fertility specialist is sued for having his clients babies turn out gay.

 

 

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