The Moreau Quartet: Volume One: 1 by S. Andrew Swann
But then the refugees would come.
In the world of Forests, as so often happens in the real world, our ideals ran aground on the shores of reality. With waves of uncontrolled immigration came all the problems that accompany it; the problem of racism, because the moreaus are more instantly identifiable, more different, than any combination of human racial and ethnic signifiers; the problem of xenophobia, because our fear of them is justified, the moreaus were engineered for warfare and are deadlier than any human; and, most importantly, the problem of assimilation, because in many cases the moreaus’ non-human biology prevents them from adapting to human culture.
As an example, the rats of my world are unpleasant. This is not due to any species bigotry on my part, but because of the unintended consequences of the way they were engineered. The rat moreaus physically mature at two years and have a life expectancy of around twelve. However, their brain is largely human, given that was the only model the engineers had to use. Studies of human moral development generally show that we don’t develop conventional morality until somewhere in our early teens. My rats, as a species, never have the opportunity to reach that stage. Morally, they are children given the status of adults, which leads to a gang-like social development that few, if any, are able to ever grow out of.
And for all the ill feelings on the human side of the equation, the moreaus are justified in reciprocating—after all, we created them in bondage, and in many cases, we did not engineer them to survive well off of the battlefield. The rats being an obvious case in point.
Of course, none of this was envisioned by the people who drafted the legislation governing this world.
• • •
Forests has been held up as an allegory on civil rights and the racial divides here in the United States—an inevitable consequence of the world I chose to write in.
I’d like to think the issues at play are of a more universal significance, drawing not just from the African-American experience in the United States, but more generally from displaced immigrant and refugee populations, from the reassimilation of conscript soldiers into peacetime, and most generally, from the friction that inevitably happens when one culture is completely surrounded by, and ruled by, another.
The plots of these four books—in this omnibus and the next—are deeply informed by these issues. But they are not about them. These themes were less the result of planning on my part and more a result of my attempt to create a plausible background for my noir storylines.
As a result, I think what I wrote about these issues in my mid-twenties is truer than anything I might have developed if I had planned a polemic. If I had naively gone that route, I suspect I would have inevitably removed many of the shades of grey in this world. I would have made the moreus more clearly the oppressed victims. I would have made the humans more clearly the oppressor.
And I would have lost the resonance these books have with the moral complexities we deal with in the real world.
Because I was writing to create a setting I believed in, not to make a point, my world is not so clearly delineated. It’s messy. It’s a place where the Pope has decreed that moreaus have souls, and the US Supreme Court has only recently ruled that the non-human rights amendment applies to human products of genetic engineering. It’s a place where there are rodent street gangs and human supremacy movements, and human-founded fertility clinics devoted to the right of every sapient being to reproduce.
And, as in the real world, I don’t have any easy answers.
• • •
There is a temptation to look for those easy answers, in the real world and especially in fiction. There is a utopian impulse, a very human need to see an endpoint to history, the thought that if we conquer just one more evil it will all be all right.
But history didn’t end with the Emancipation Proclamation, with the end of Jim Crow, or with the election of a black president. It did not end with the fall of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. It doesn’t end by electing the right people or by fighting the right wars.
It doesn’t end by not fighting them.
It. Just. Doesn’t. End.
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S. Andrew Swann, The Moreau Quartet: Volume One: 1