You Have Arrived at Your Destination by Amor Towles: book review

You Have Arrived at Your Destination (2019) is part of the ‘Forward’ series—a collection of writing about the near and far future.

Sam has bought a new car for his birthday and the GPS system announces that he has arrived at his destination—Vitek. Vitek is a fertility lab that his wife Annie told him about. It is not only designed to guarantee pregnancy; it produces designer babies – to get the intelligence and character that the parents want. Predictive pregnancy!

There are a series of videos to watch, called Projections—a watch and select exercise (which Sam watches without Annie). These are called Realistic Realizations. Now, it’s getting a bit weird for me.

This is an extra-short novella. I’m calling this a Not-for-Me-Novella. It’s an unsettling prompt for the nature versus nurture debate about having and raising a child. And it’s about choices.

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of: Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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