The Clockwork Man by E.V. Odle
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Transgender Pioneer

God obviously was having a bad day on the creation drawing board when he thought testosterone and its primary effect, the XY chromosome, was a good idea. The substance is a plague on all sexes. Everyone becomes its victim either through its direct compulsive effects or its destructive consequences. What better vision for futuristic fiction than the correction of this fundamental design flaw in the human species? This was Edwin Odle’s mission almost 100 years ago.

Odle knew just how fundamental the transformation of maleness would have to be, and how long it might take. Since it is masculine competitiveness, its barely controllable emotion, the longed-for mate-ship among men, and the aggressive and irrational striving for dominance which forms our global culture, it makes no sense to talk about cultural change without dealing with the source. And since the issue resides in biology itself, the solution must be genetic.

Or, more accurately, the solution, in Odle’s story, is the circumvention of genetics entirely because biological evolution can’t really be trusted to do the job in time. What’s necessary is what has come to be called the Singularity, that point at which man (that is to say the male gender) becomes indistinguishable from machine. It is only through the machine (or what we now call Artificial Intelligence) that the worst excesses of maleness can be mitigated.

Surprisingly, none of the most recent pundits of advanced technology have picked up on Odle’s suggestion that its real function could be the elimination of hormonally-induced insanity. Margaret Atwood’s fiction certainly hints at the need; but even she does not contemplate Odle’s innovative solution to this pressing problem. With leaders like Trump, Putin, Erdogan, and Bolsonaro among so many others, the world is on a knife-edge. There is a glut of fragile chromosomes which threatens global destruction. Odle provides a blueprint for salvation.

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