Eugenics as understood by people 100 to 150 years ago was a different animal than the two-striped ideological beast in Left wing/Right wing debates today. In our current climate eugenics is about race war and is based on the Nazi experience, which involved a severe skewing of the concept.

Eugenics is Greek for ‘good-generation’, ‘good-birthing’ or ‘good-parenting’ depending on what ancient Greek thinker you might have asked and what his dialect was. The concept was deeply imbedded in the Gospels which were preceded in literature by hero legends [some involving ascension] in which various virgin births of ancient heroes were attributed to a divine interest in the human bloodline. The 19th Century concept was aimed at the cultivating of the best possible people. Various peoples have practiced different versions of this. There is an Amazonian tribe where the women attempt to regulate conception by being inseminated by three different men who possess three varying desirable characteristics, trying to engineer their own multi-tasking super baby.

Our current concept of eugenics is either Right wing and based on racial purity as a politically separatist goal, or Left wing and based on racial homogeneity as a politically absolute goal—a global monocrop of people. The implications of either of these genetic end games are both vastly interesting to the sci-fi writer, as are the next probable entry into the game; the engineering of designer people for specific goals or tasks.

I am currently looking at an old variation on the genetic theme, a theme that died with the authors that were exploring it about 100 years ago. Jack London, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard all explored racial memory as fiction themes. I have also detected some inclination to this possibility in the writings of Aristotle, Menander, Pausanius, Darwin, Stoker, Ohiyesa, Black Elk, Lovecraft, and Wolfe, and am interested in exploring the possibilities.

I have used the Hemavore, Fruit of The Deceiver and Winter settings as vehicles for the exploration of this theme. I have used method writing in all of these—writing when the weather is similar to the weather in the story—and am primed to finish Winter, a novella, all but the last two chapters of which will be serialized as online content in this space. Three installments already exist if you would like to get started now. The Winter tag link is below, as are the tag links for the other serials in which I explore the question of racial memory.

The racial memory theme supposes that blood has memory traces that are revealed in dream sequences to the carrier of a certain genetic line. I believe Stoker was going after this early on in Dracula and got off topic. Edgar Rice Burroughs’ novel War Chief is explicitly along these lines, as was much of Robert E. Howard’s fiction.