Breeding programs
This list includes works featuring breeding programs. These may be classical eugenics style programs, aimed at wiping out "undesirable" traits, enhancing other traits, or they may be features of an effort to eliminate disease or adapt to particular environments.
These works may explore the ideology behind a breeding program or the consequences thereof. Some take as an assumption certain eugenic or essentialist notions, but others do not. Some works simply use breeding programs as a signal of fascism or lack of reproductive control, or to play with anxiety about biotechnology.
See also
List of works
To enhance particular traits
- Octavia Butler. Wild Seed and sequels - one man and his breeding program of "special" people ...
For sex
- Parks, Severna. Speaking Dreams (Firebrand, 1992) and The Hand of Prophecy. In both, slave-traders breed humans for certain desireable physical attributes.
- Starhawk. The Fifth Sacred Thing. Evil patriarchal fundamentalists breed "angel" babies - small blonde children - for their disposable sex toys.
To eliminate traits
- Sheri S. Tepper. The Gates to Women's Country
To adapt a species
- Octavia Butler. Xenogenesis trilogy, including Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago
- Algis Budrys, "Between the Dark and the Daylight"
For social engineering
- Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World
Other
- May, Julian. The Many-Colored Land (1981) (in another time human women are kept as breeders for an alien almost human species)
- McKay, Claudia. Promise of the Rose Stone (New Victoria Publishers, 1986) ISBN 0-934678-09-X - a Federation rules Earth, with the assistance of a perhaps-enslaved mysterious satellite-sized being. Our protagonist Isa, a mountain warrior, travels to a Federation village, and then is sent to the satellite where women are bred for unknown purposes ...
- Payes, Rachel Cosgrove. "Come Take a Dip with Me in the Genetic Pool" (in Dystopian Visions, edited by Roger Elwood (Prentice Hall: 1975).
- Kate Wilhelm. Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang (1976) (first they bred clones; then they began breeding non-clones)