Terrifyingly unbothered

I teach biology at a preparatoria in Guadalajara and I have been teaching CRISPR gene editing to seventeen-year-olds for four years and every cohort has the same reaction: interest, a brief ethical pause, and then a rapid return to the interesting part. They are not bothered by the implications in the way I expected them to be, and I've been thinking about why ever since. The science fiction I write is about families navigating genetic medicine. Not dystopia, not designer babies as a cautionary tale. More specific: a family in Mexico in 2039 where one child has been genetically screened for a hereditary condition and another hasn't, and what that difference does to the way the family understands itself. The science in my stories is correct because I teach it and I won't compromise on that. The human material is harder. I live near the Parque Metropolitano in Guadalajara and I write on weekend mornings and occasionally on the bus to school. The story I'm currently finishing is 8,000 words, a short story, and it is the second one I've written about this family. The second one is better than the first in the ways that matter: the mother is more real, the conflict is more internal. I'm going to write a third and then decide if there's a novel in them.