Strange Germs and Hopeful Monsters: Alexander Laing's 1930s American Biotechnology Tales

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

In July of 1934, an American mystery novel by Alexander Laing titled The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck became an unexpected sensation, selling out its first edition by the time of publication and climbing the best-seller charts over the next several months. A hybrid of horror, and hard-boiled detective tale, Wyck riveted readers and critics with its ghoulish subject matter?including abortions, babies born with fused lower limbs, an epileptic murderer, and a woman driven mad by sadistic research experiments. Wyck was, in fact, so gory and bizarre that the novel's book jacket warned that people unable to sustain violent shock (should) read this book on their own responsibil ity, and subsequent editions of the book abridged some of its extreme passages.1 Eighteen months later, Laing published another novel just as peculiar (if not as commercially successful) as its predecessor, The Motives of Nicholas Holtz, Or, The Weird Tale of the Ironville Virus. In this bioterror thriller, which nowadays seems decades ahead of its time, a munitions magnate tries to weaponize a lethal virus that is created by a scientist bent on the spontaneous generation of life from inorganic matter. Seventy-odd years after they were published, Laing's two novels are obscure curiosities, rarely available in libraries and unknown to all but a few horror buffs and historians of medicine. This is because Wyck and Holtz do not fit neatly into the stories we tell about the relationship between literature, medicine, and technology in the twentieth century: they are not clearly classifiable as science fiction, and they fall outside of the purview of literary scholars and those in the field of medical humanities. Their obscurity is unfortunate, as these novels are arguably just as relevant to any discussion of American biotech fiction as works such as Greg Bear's Darwin's Radio or Michael Crichton's Terminal Man. Deeply engaged with the of their time, they can help us to chart out the prehistory of what we now think of as the biotechnology