"Prognosticating the doom of the future" is base on the issues that the author of Salt Fish Girl, Larissa Lai tries to stress out.

Essay by McShellCollege, UndergraduateA-, April 2004

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Larissa Lai, born in California in 1967 is the author of this astonishing activist fiction- Salt Fish Girl, which brings out issues of guerilla tactics, worker exploitation, sensual relationships, and feminist politics. Although, these issues are happening throughout the world nowadays, they are not the ones that make this novel a powerful intimation. In this novel, the core conflicts are the morals and ethics of cloning and genetic manipulations. Lai intentionally smears historical and future narratives to let us be aware of the possibility that the unwholesome society in the novel is going to emerge from the material world. In the world of Salt Fish Girl, Lai is using the absence of morals and ethics to show us the society where genetic mutations are out of control, and where strict control is required to keep the populace safe. Although Lai's novel seems farfetched and unbelievable, the steady improvement of our society could indeed indicate that such a reality will come true in the near future.

The basic elements of Lai's society is gradually forming under the recent advances in animal cloning, human genetic research, as well as existing practices in plant genetics.

Recently, the news coverage on genetically modified foods has raised a concern that such foods are unsafe for human consumption and because they may have possible side effects. In fact, there has been so much concern about such foods that food regulation associations now require the modified foods be labeled as such. Currently, genetically modified food's technique is improving in a fast pace, and one of the greatest advantages for this technique is the highly accurate precision. Some of the benefits of such modifications are introducing cold-hardy plant's gene into a strawberry to help increase its tolerance to cold weather, or to improve the texture...