Faulty Genes

Faulty Genes is a future fantasy novel about a world dominated by the anxieties of perfecting genetic engineering and the establishment of a fully functional utilitarian society. It is a satire where a terrible epidemic affecting the male testicles breaks out all over the world. As a result the male population is virtually wiped out; however, during the course of the epidemic in a knee jerk reaction the men behave abominably towards the women whom they try to pin the blame on for this catastrophic disease. When the women, finally taking over after the men have been dying out in droves and theres no one left to man the labs and everything else, manage to develop a cure, they do not use it to save the men, but decide to create a new Womens Polity instead, where only a small sample of men shall be preserved in a special compound for procreation purposes. All procreation, however, is carried out by artificial insemination and the new world order is established where, at first, most of the ills of the world that had been endemic have been eliminated. Pollution, overpopulation and aggression become things of the past. Wars cease, urban violence no longer appears and a more rational organisiation of production for needs rather than profit leads to a vast improvement in the problem of pollution. The Emergency Council that had been governing the world through this crisis declares the Womens Polity in force and a bureaucratic system of governance by Committees and Councils of Elder Women is instituted.

Life becomes totally regimented and regulated for all women who have eventually become numbers and live by the strict rules of the Polity, and hardly as living and breathing human beings any more. A few generations down, men have become an unknown quantity, a bogey from the history books, the incarnation of all evil on the planet. The quest is now on to perfect a manner of reproduction that can do away with male spermatozoa altogether so that even the last vestiges of men on the planet may be eventually eliminated. So far cloning has proved inadequate, after all as the Director of the Andrological Compound says, You can clone a body, a brain reasonably well, but how can you clone a mind? and the search is on.

However, it appears that genetic engineering has not been perfected and despite all efforts at achieving complete order and total conformity among women there are aberrations. One of these is Twenty Twenty a girl of sixteen whose exuberance and energy is such that she is considered a threat and an anomaly. Since, however, she has committed no crime (other than breaking windows by accident with a ball, and punching the head girl at school for mortally insulting her by saying that she was like a boy) they decide to banish her to the Andrological Compound, the farm where the males of the species are kept and reared. Like everybody else in the outside world, she has never even seen a man before and the prospect of having to live and work there terrifies her. Will I be thrown into a hole and forced to wash men? She wails in terror and in anguish, totally disconcerting the officer in charge of her case. And when she actually has her first encounter with a man the experience is traumatic.

The large wooden door creaked on its hinges and something, holding a tray with two glasses, walked slowly and carefully in. Twenty Twenty caught her breath. It looked human by the way it walked and held itself, but it had hair growing thickly under its nose and over the lower part of its face and its shape was decidedly weird. A deformed old woman, physically impaired. She darted a terrified look at the Director who seemed entirely unperturbed and was in fact actually smiling kindly at the creature coming in. Twenty Twentys chest tightened in fear, her breath grew short and cold sweat broke out over her brow. In this age of perfect gen