New Orbit Magazine Issue 08; Feb 2020, The Future of Animals

_____________
I love animals.
Since before I can remember, my loving
of animals has been one of my most
defining characteristics. Sure, I love
literature. Yes, I love technology. I also love
a good, old-fashioned political debate. But
animals? I love animals.
Among jobs and study in writing, I've
spent hundreds of volunteer hours at
native bird rescues, zoos, and domestic
rescue centres like the SPCA; as well as
working for years as a canine wilderness
adventure handler (which was exactly as
wild/chaotic/fun as it sounds). I've loved
every minute of them. I’ve shared a home
with dogs, cats, house-trained rabbits, rats,
pigeons, chickens, gerbils, frogs, freshwater
fish, and many more. As a child I wrote
encyclopaedias and bestiaries detailing
animals and ecosystems I’d invented
myself, or biologically legitimised mythical
creatures, or speculative future evolutions.
At the age of three or four I built a “zoo”
in my playhouse stocked with bugs and
insects I found in my back garden that I
would charge my parents a couple of
pennies to enter (I was saving up for a dog,
after all).
This special issue, as you must be able to
tell, is very important to me. Animals
feature a lot across many genres of fiction,
but writers often seem to experience
something of a blind spot in science fiction
and dystopias where animals – realistic,
important, living animals – are concerned.
All too often animals are the familiar props
in unfamiliar stories – in a desolate future
cityscape, post-human androids might
share the streets with centuries-unchanged
dogs and rats. A post-apocalyptic
countryside might see us riding the same
normal horses around the carcasses of cars
and trains and other long-dead technology.
Often, we’re so preoccupied with how the
future will affect us, or creatures very like
us, that we forget to consider how the
experiences of the billions of others around
us will shift just as severely – often more.
Or, often, we’ll see animals as passive
victims of the forward charge of human
conquest – unfortunate, suffering, but not
quite able to conceive of change, time, or
really much at all.
As usual, we’ve got them figured out all
wrong.
This issue has some exceptional stories –
some personal favourites of my own – from
a wide range of perspectives. One discusses
how wild animal populations that have
been isolated from human interference
might be the only ones with the genetic
strength or survive off-world – a priceless
and underestimated resource that nature
has shaped right under our own nose.
Another sees the emerging commercial
industry of pet cloning through the eyes of