Sebastian Faulks: ‘The last remaining human species needn’t have been so violent and clever as we are’
Your new novel, The Seventh Son, begins with an experiment at an IVF clinic that stretches the bounds of scientific knowledge andIt’s something that’s been kicking around in my mind since I wrote Human Traces, when I did a lot of research into genetics and evolution and the roots of mental illness. Then it was discovered in about 2010 that most people in the world have a degree of Neanderthal in our genome. I found it rather thrilling. And then about three years ago, I read a tweet by Richard Dawkins, imagining some kind of genetic engineering experiment. And I thought, maybe that could be the basis of a story.
