Michael Blumlein (1948– ) is a US science-fiction writer who works full-time as a medical doctor at the University of California, San Francisco. His novels include The Movement of Mountains (1987), X, Y (1993), and The Healer (2005). Despite a small output—he has only published six books—Blumlein has had considerable impact on the field, beginning with his first published story, “Tissue Ablation and Variant Regeneration: A Case Report” for Interzone (1984). This tale remains one of the most astonishingly savage political assaults ever published. The target is Ronald Reagan, whose living body is eviscerated without anesthetic by a team of doctors, partly to punish him for the evils he has allowed to flourish in the world and partly to make amends for those evils through the biologically engineered growth and transformation of the ablated tissues into foodstuffs and other goods ultimately derived from the flesh, which are then sent to the impoverished of the Earth. The story recalls the “condensed novels” of J. G. Ballard and would not have been out of place in a New Wave–era volume of New Worlds magazine.
“Tissue Ablation” and other remarkable tales, including the striking exploration of gender couched in the language of medicine reprinted in this anthology, “The Brains of Rats” (originally published in Interzone, 1986), were assembled as The Brains of Rats (1989), which also included original stories such as “The Wet Suit.” Blumlein’s later stories, assembled in What the Doctor Ordered (2014)—which includes a novella, “The Roberts” (2010)—continue in the same externally cool, internally incandescent manner. At his best, Blumlein writes tales in which, with an air of remote sangfroid, he makes unrelenting assaults on public issues (and figures).
The writer Michael McDowell notes in his astute introduction to The Brains of Rats, “The futured world of Blumlein’s occasional science-fiction stories is strange and unsettling. Fellini’s stylized and grotesque cinematic past is probably nearest to it, not because its details are correct but simply because history is shown to be alien and unrecognizable…aberrations sanctioned in fiction only by their reality [which] segue abruptly into the pathology of the civilized mind.”
Blumlein’s almost scatological fearlessness—seemingly influenced by the Decadents and Symbolists as well as his medical background—demonstrates the very considerable thematic and stylistic range of late twentieth-century science fiction, and shows how very far from reassuring it could be. In some ways, the story and the writer’s career have been an unintended rebuke to the bourgeois middle-of-the-road quality of much 1980s and 1990s Humanist SF. Certainly, his fiction often reminds the reader more of attempts at a grittier realism in speculative fiction by writers like James Tiptree Jr. (linked in part by explorations of weird pathology).
Even today, “The Brains of Rats” shocks and disturbs, with its far-from-likable narrator and the provocative ideas to which he gives voice.