Kathryn Lance/Addendum

Author note about how Pandora’s Genes came to be

One morning in the late seventies I saw a short squib in the New York Times business section about a company that was working to genetically alter bacteria that naturally consume oil so that they might be used to clean up oil spills. I thought, “Great! But what if your car catches it?”

This idea germinated for a while and became the nucleus of the setting for Pandora’s Genes and Pandora’s Children, post-holocaust romantic adventure novels set in the late 21st century. In the world I came to imagine, genetically engineered bacteria were used on a particularly severe oil spill, and mutated to develop a taste for all petroleum products.

The new bacteria spread rapidly, destroying the functionality of all machinery that runs on oil products, as well as all things containing plastic and other petro-based items. Among the things destroyed were the fail-safe seals that confined other recombinant-DNA experiments, as well as deadly viruses being engineered in secret germ-warfare research. The result was a greatly de-populated world, with many animal and insect species extinct or deleteriously altered, and with no remnants of what we consider modern technology.

One of the engineered diseases let loose was an inheritable illness in which affected women die in childbirth, usually upon having a second female child. The resulting rarity of women is the plot point that sets my story in motion.

Both novels focus on two opposed groups, one, led by The Principal, which wishes to restore some semblance of civilization, and their antagonists, The Traders, a fanatical religious group dedicated to the final, total eradication of all remnants of “science” and the “wild deenas” (DNA) that science loosed on the world. (They make the sacred sign of the double spiral in their rites.)

Against this science fictional background is set an unusual love triangle involving two men and the young girl that they both love. These three protagonists, Evvy, The Principal, and Zach, his right-hand man, alternate as the main POV character in both books.