James Gardner: Three Hearings on the Existence of Snakes in the Human Bloodstream

“Three Hearings on the Existence of Snakes in the Human Bloodstream”:It’s seldom that I can actually trace the genesis of a story, but “Three Hearings…” is an exception. The night of January 1, 1996, I couldn’t sleep; and when I got out of bed to find something to do with myself, I happened to pick up a how-to-write-poetry book I’d been meaning to read. (There’s this nagging voice in the back of my head that keeps saying, “Jeez, I really should know something about poetry. And microbiology. And Chinese folklore.” That voice is why I keep writing science fiction instead of something respectable, like murder mysteries.)

Anyway, I opened the poetry book at random and found a short poem called “The Oxen” by Thomas Hardy. The poem is based on a folk tradition that oxen supposedly kneel on Christmas Eve, just as they knelt before the baby Jesus on the first Christmas. Hardy wistfully thinks about the legend and says he would like someone to say to him, “Let’s go into the fields to see the oxen kneeling.” Even better, he’d like to see that they are kneeling. To me, the poem was about becoming tired of modern sophistication: nostalgically wishing for simplicity and simple proofs of faith.

This led me to think of a point in history where a simple article of faith was suddenly exposed as a lie. My notes say, “Someone has invented a telescope or a microscope which shows the belief is not true; that person is pulled in front of the High Priest to judge his heresy. The High Priest is a sophisticated man and feels the symbolic truth is more important than the literal; but he knows that for some people, this tiny thing will undermine their faith.”

It’s a stock situation in science fiction: the moment when science confronts religion. But then I decided things would be more interesting if, for some people, the microscope/telescope did confirm their simple faith. Some metaphoric claim of something in a person’s blood… and with the poor quality of early microscopes, some people saw what their religion claimed would be there. Over the generations, those who did see something would intermarry with one another, tending to reinforce the trait within that population…

A pattern immediately presented itself: first Leeuwenhoek with the microscope; then Darwin explaining how selection processes emphasized the trait; and finally, a modern scientist who could lay out the whole situation with real chemistry. The parallels with Rh-positive and Rh-negative blood were just begging to be exploited… and the story wrote itself from there.