Mother of Invention
Pollen tsunamis, deadly allergies, and shape-shifting houses.
I’ve just finished reading Nnedi Okorafor‘s Mother of Invention that can be found in Future Tense Fiction: Stories of Tomorrow. Nnedi is well known for her work of Africanfuturism and Africanjujuism. (If you want to read more about the difference between Africanfuturism, Afrofutirism, and Africanjujusim here’s a quick piece she wrote to clarify the different terms.)
The short story follows Anwuli, a pregnant woman living in New Delta, Nigeria, the world’s greenest city. The city is carpeted with a genetically engineered “miracle grass” called periwinkle grass. It is well liked for its air-scrubbing abilities that leads to air so clean it smells perfumed, is speckled by hyper-resilient (uncrushable) flowers, produces peri (a seed that can be eaten like rice), and can only be grown in New Delta due to its history as swampland. However, due to climate change the periwinkle grass’s once genetically staggered pollination period has become synchronized, leading to massive ‘pollen tsunamis’ that carpet the city in a yellow haze. This in turn has led a portion of the populace to become deathly allergic to the peri pollen storms. The only way to overcome a fatal allergy is to leave for the safety of a neighbouring city and receive anti-allergen injections for 5-months.
What’s special about this story is that it outlines a few things:
All technologies have unintended consequences. Even something as seemingly mundane as genetically engineered grass can have serious consequences on the lives of people. In the short narrative, we see that the original designers of the grass have attempted to mitigate these consequences by originally programming the plants so that only a third of the grass population would pollinate at a given time. However, over time the cycles became synchronized, which leads me to a second takeaway:
Nature will always outwit humans as designers. However much humans will try to design and control nature, nature has a way of regulating itself, of finding its own equilibrium. In nature, plants synchronize their pollination cycles to optimize fertilization. It’s only natural that the genetically engineered plants would eventually revert to a more natural behaviour.
The other thing I really enjoyed from this story was the relationship between inhabitant (Anwuli) and house (Obi 3).In this future, homes are not only smart, they’re also autonomous. These houses are able to submit requests for building materials to their home owners so that it can conduct repairs and renovations. These homes are also able to reconfigure their spaces through modular pods that can be shifted around. They can move themselves around to follow the sun (or hide from it), they can lift themselves up in times of flooding and can also huddle together in times of intense weather. I really enjoyed imagining houses that could walk, could act as a virtual assistant, and could actively protect its residents. It’s definitely a change of mindset from the way we currently think of buildings as static, dumb structures.
Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society. You can purchase the book here.