Solution Three [Paperback]

Two centuries in the future, humankind and its world are almost unrecognizable, a Utopia in progress. After an apocalyptic period in which most cities and food-producing regions were ravaged, the essential dangers facing the race were identified as overpopulation and aggression. Soon, three Solutions were set in place, one after the other. These Solutions were (if I've got this right): the stigmatization of heterosexuality to combat overpopulation, the apportioning to everyone of rather small "reasonably equal living spaces" to eliminate envy and possessiveness, and finally the replacing of ordinary childbirth with homosexual mothers giving birth to "perfect" clone children who would then be taken from the mothers as toddlers, around the age of two, and raised by the State.

As Mitchison notes in the introduction, her emphasis here is with a biological science fiction and not with the sci-fi of physics. So this is hard sci-fi, but heavy on social situations . . . and none of that fun spectacle-oriented aliens-n-spacecraft stuff. Over the course of the novel, a parallel develops between crises in social engineering and agricultural engineering. Something unexpected and frightening is happening with the genetically tampered-with food supply, and something similar may be afflicting the clones.

In the end, the novel illuminates the growing and disturbing superstitious belief in scientific progress as something that will outpace its own horrendous destructive effects, as something that will--in the words of Wendell Berry--accomplish a "long end run that will carry us and the environment over the goal line of survival." This belief is not merely hope; it is faith.

In terms of literary merit, there is some similarity here to Brave New World (Aldous Huxley was a childhood friend of Mitchison's); however, I found Mitchison's characters far more convincing and lifelike than Huxley's. She also demonstrates a deft hand with fluid viewpoint technique and concise narrative structuring (this ambitious book runs to just 160 pages). If I have one complaint with the novel, it's that we're left wondering: did they really solve anything, and just how big of a mess are these people left with? A similar novel, which perhaps takes things a bit further (and with a fair amount of black humor) is Anthony Burgess's The Wanting Seed, published 13 years earlier--another problematic-Utopia novel not to be missed.

Doing a little background search, I found that Naomi Mitchison led quite a life. She was an activist for women's rights in Britain (indeed, my edition of Solution Three was published by the Feminist Press), married a Labour politician who became a Life Peer, wrote some 90 book . . . . Oh, and in the collected letters of JRR Tolkien we find a substantial correspondence between Mitchison and himself as well as notice that she was a proofreader for The Lord of the Rings.

A final note: the Feminist Press edition of the novel has a long afterword with some great information on Mitchision, but it also judges the engineered Utopia of the novel in too positive a light when, after all, the author herself labeled it a "horrid idea" in her dedication.

with the small twist of having a society of homosexuals, the story was interesting, alittle slow in the beginning, and it gives you a sense that your getting a very brief lesson on population genetics, But IT IS still a Great "what If" book,and one which i enjoyed.