Pantropy, Polyploidy, and Tectogenesis in the Fiction of James Blish and Norman L. Knight

A concern with genetic engineering links The Seedling Stars, Titans’ Daughter, and A Torrent of Faces. In the four stories which make up The Seedling Stars, the most important of these three books, a technique designed to fit human beings to alien worlds is called “pantropy,” which means “changing everything.” The question arises, if everything about a human being is, or can be, changed, is the result still a human being? This dichotomy between change and an unchanging human reality or essential truth is ambiguously mediated by a developing sexual analogy which figures in the two central stories, “The Thing in the Attic” and “Surface Tension.” Experiments with polyploidy have led to the creation of a persecuted race of giants in Titans’ Daughter, a work marred by hokey plotting, poor characterization, and contrived symbolism. A Torrent of Faces, by Blish and Knight, takes over a process called “tectogenesis” and artificial sea beings called “Tritons” from Knight’s 1940 novella, “Crisis in Utopia.” An analysis of letters exchanged between the two authors (and now part of the Bodleian Library Blish Papers) reveals the division of labor that went into the novel over a 19-year period. What might appear to be a division between the themes of overpopulation and tectogenesis is shown to be reconciled by the Tritons. Blish’s and Knight’s work in the area of genetic engineering mediates between that of Wells, Stapledon, and Huxley on the one hand, and that of Pohl and Varley on the other. (DK)