Without doubt this is my most personal book to date. It took a lot of work to produce. I spent more than a year researching the subject of eugenics itself, reading articles and even scholarly papers on the topic. I read so much that I decided to include quotes at the beginning of every chapter. Some readers have told me that the people that I quoted really surprised them because they had not known that they were connected with, or had any sympathy for, the false science of eugenics.
The subject is quite demanding, and I knew that it could not be accommodated within the main story that I was writing. I came up with the idea of holding an international congress of eugenics on a fictitious airship that flies from Britain to America, then Germany, and back to Britain again. This device allowed me to examine in some greater detail how eugenics, the idea that the human race can be improved by selective breeding, developed into dysgenics, the negative form that was seen in Nazi Germany, but which was not limited to that regime. This section gets a little heavy with scientific jargon, 'a bit wordy' as one reader put it, but it felt necessary. I wanted people to have a clear idea of the subject and why it is so dangerous.
It was always my intention to have a group of young disabled people as the main heroes of this story. I also wanted them to be the engineers of their own fate. Yes, some able people do assist them but no, they do not sit around waiting to be helped. An important aspect of their story was that it should be thrilling. I wanted chases that involved cars, trains, and aeroplanes, fights, breath-taking escapes, wonderous developments and tragic setbacks. In essence it was to be a great adventure against a dark landscape and young Grace, Tom, Mary, and Hector were to be the heroes of it. I set them each an apparently unsurmountable obstacle, to be disabled in the 1930's. Grace was born without one hand and one leg below the knee. Tom is blind and born of mix-race parentage. Mary has stunted growth. Hector is losing the use of his legs and needs to use a wheelchair. Together they have to overcome the Ministry of Social Biology, a huge government department with vast resources. It is also winning public opinion over to its argument that the disabled should be segregated from the rest of society; not seen and not heard.
Although it gets very bleak in this alternate 1930's world that I created, Eugenica has a positive message as it takes the triumph of the human spirit in adversity as its key theme. There are good people in the world, it is that sometimes it takes terrible events to make them appear in our lives.
If I have piqued your interest, then you can find more information about this book here: Eugenica
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