Never Let Me Go
Jan. 17th, 2023 08:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingThis morning I woke up and realized that I could write erotic fanfiction of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nobel Prize-winning novel Never Let Me Go, and that it would be kind of interesting actually.
In the 1990s, there is a class of people who are artificially birthed and raised in institutions so that they can serve as medical donors. This is because donations of blood, bone marrow, and organs perform exponentially better if they come from a living person instead of stem cells (or non-human donors such as sheep and pigs).
This class of organ donors is cloned from people who have no rights, such as prison inmates, elderly residents of assisted care facilities, and people suffering from crushing debt. These cloned babies are genetically enhanced to be stronger and healthier, which renders them even more inhuman in the eyes of general society.
These children are raised in institutions until they reach sexual maturity, at which point they are sterilized. They begin donations at around age fifteen and “complete” their donations at around age twenty. They are kept almost entirely separate from the general population, and they are led to believe that donation is a privilege. In truth, the donation care facilities where they end their short lives are infinitely preferable to the institutions in which they’re raised.
Never Let Me Go works the way it does because it’s set in the south of England. But what if it were set in Philadelphia? There’s no way the “students” of these institutions wouldn’t riot.
So what if a leader emerged from one of the institutions, escaped, and went underground for a few years before emerging to organize other doners into acts of domestic terrorism?
And then, what if he was located and approached by a doctor, who said basically this: Her life was saved by organ donations when she was younger. She now works at several donation facilities, and she thinks the donations should be ended. Donations are accepted because the doners are considered to be human-shaped animals, and she hopes public opinion would change if people knew the truth.
It’s necessary that something drastic be done quickly for two reasons. First, there are unsubstantiated but persistent rumors that the genetic modification of the donor clones would not allow them to live much longer than thirty, so it’s possible that the older escapees are running out of time. Second, even in the 1990s, it’s impossible for an urban underground resistance movement to remain active for long, so they need the sort of public support that would be garnered by a positive symbol. The doctor thinks a half-clone baby resulting from a romantic relationship would be ideal.
She volunteers to reverse the vasectomy performed on one of the clones so that she herself can become pregnant with his child, all the while acting out a manufactured love story. And that’s where the “erotic fanfiction” part comes into play – this is basically an arranged marriage. Instead of outdated gender roles, the romantic friction will come from (marginally outdated?) bioethics.
Anyway. This is an idea that would be fun to write but has no market. It's probably best to file this away and save it for later incorporation into a larger story.
In the 1990s, there is a class of people who are artificially birthed and raised in institutions so that they can serve as medical donors. This is because donations of blood, bone marrow, and organs perform exponentially better if they come from a living person instead of stem cells (or non-human donors such as sheep and pigs).
This class of organ donors is cloned from people who have no rights, such as prison inmates, elderly residents of assisted care facilities, and people suffering from crushing debt. These cloned babies are genetically enhanced to be stronger and healthier, which renders them even more inhuman in the eyes of general society.
These children are raised in institutions until they reach sexual maturity, at which point they are sterilized. They begin donations at around age fifteen and “complete” their donations at around age twenty. They are kept almost entirely separate from the general population, and they are led to believe that donation is a privilege. In truth, the donation care facilities where they end their short lives are infinitely preferable to the institutions in which they’re raised.
Never Let Me Go works the way it does because it’s set in the south of England. But what if it were set in Philadelphia? There’s no way the “students” of these institutions wouldn’t riot.
So what if a leader emerged from one of the institutions, escaped, and went underground for a few years before emerging to organize other doners into acts of domestic terrorism?
And then, what if he was located and approached by a doctor, who said basically this: Her life was saved by organ donations when she was younger. She now works at several donation facilities, and she thinks the donations should be ended. Donations are accepted because the doners are considered to be human-shaped animals, and she hopes public opinion would change if people knew the truth.
It’s necessary that something drastic be done quickly for two reasons. First, there are unsubstantiated but persistent rumors that the genetic modification of the donor clones would not allow them to live much longer than thirty, so it’s possible that the older escapees are running out of time. Second, even in the 1990s, it’s impossible for an urban underground resistance movement to remain active for long, so they need the sort of public support that would be garnered by a positive symbol. The doctor thinks a half-clone baby resulting from a romantic relationship would be ideal.
She volunteers to reverse the vasectomy performed on one of the clones so that she herself can become pregnant with his child, all the while acting out a manufactured love story. And that’s where the “erotic fanfiction” part comes into play – this is basically an arranged marriage. Instead of outdated gender roles, the romantic friction will come from (marginally outdated?) bioethics.
Anyway. This is an idea that would be fun to write but has no market. It's probably best to file this away and save it for later incorporation into a larger story.
