The Seventh Son

"Yes, but this one’s bang up to date. I was involved with this because I was one of the people that he asked to read the text in terms of providing a view on what’s accurate or feasible archaeologically, and in terms of the discipline itself. I don’t know! But Faulks’s novel is a worthy addition to this literary community. It’s important because it’s a different book to the others. It’s not about imagining Neanderthals in the past. It’s not even necessarily about imagining who Neanderthals were in their own world in relation to us now. It’s a book about all the complexities of the modern day and where Neanderthals might fit in. It’s science fiction, set slightly in the future. It involves an anthropologist, again, so there’s a little echo of The Last Neanderthal , but this is about genetic engineering. When you work on Neanderthals, one of the questions that people always want to ask you is ‘How did they go extinct?’ One of the other questions that will be asked is either, ‘What would the world be like if they hadn’t been extinct?’ (which is impossible to answer) or, ‘What would Neanderthals be like if we brought them back?’ People are very well aware about the entire genetic engineering, de-extinction trend. Yes. And with all of the stuff that’s going on with gene editing and everything, it is technically possible to imagine, or to do, what’s discussed in The Seventh Son , which is to have a hybrid Neanderthal child. No, and this is also part of the book’s themes, because it’s about hubris and personality. There’s a big tech giant who does this on the sly, but because of the involvement of an anthropologist in the story, it’s also linked to some of those themes from Slimak’s book of how we think about Neanderthals. Or, in particular, how our thinking about them is always also about ourselves. That’s how Neanderthals function for us, in a cultural sense. We force them to be a mirror. Sometimes we’re interested in them for their own sake, but sometimes we just want to see our own reflection. We use them as a foil, and that’s also what this book is doing. It’s asking, ‘What would the personal ramifications be if a hybrid child really was created? What would they be for that child? What would they be for the family? What would they be, eventually, for the people around them if it became known that that had happened? I think it’s a very useful addition to this whole literary history of imagining Neanderthals because it’s not really like the others. There are other books that have thought about hybrid Neanderthals, so Faulks is not the only one that’s done this, but he’s willing to think hard about how we would feel. It’s not really about Neanderthals at all. It’s about what it would be to be a hybrid child, what it would mean for the mother of that child, and asks if there’s any space for that kind of existence. I think it’s both. Scientists are humans, they live in a cultural world, they are affected consciously or unconsciously by ideas and notions and biases. And creativity and imagination have to be part of what we do. We create a critical frame and a scientific structure within which to try to contain that and use it, rather than letting it drive the entirety of our inferences and our thoughts. We do try to have a boundary around it, but it has to be there in the first place."