Boundary Transgressions: the Human-Animal Chimera in Science Fiction

Abstract

This paper explores how science fiction writers have used human-animal chimera experiments as the inspiration for creating characters that challenge us to consider what is quintessentially human and what is animal. Since Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) created a manufactured man from parts of dead animals and humans combined, and H.G. Wells wrote about vivisection used to create the Beast Men in The Island of Dr. Moreau in 1896, animal experimentation has been mirrored in science fiction. Xenotransplantation is used with tragic-comic effect in Mikhail Bulgakov’s long banned 1932 novel A Dog’s Heart, and with pathos in Malorie Blackman’s 1997 children’s novel Pig Heart Boy. Shostakovich’s recently resurrected 1932 satiric opera, Orango, explores the results of doctors inseminating female primates with their own sperm. In Vincenzo Natali’s 2009 transgenic science fiction horror film Splice, Dren – the ultimate chimera – is created by scientists Clive and Elsa splicing multiple animal and human DNA. As Donna Haraway predicted in A Manifesto for Cyborgs (1991), “[b]y the late twentieth century […] nothing really convincingly settles the separation of the human and animal”. In investigating the manufactured human-animal chimera as a cyborg, the literary trope of the mad scientist that emerged with Frankenstein is examined.