"'Embryos are like photograph flim,' said Mr. Foster waggishly, as he pushed open the second door. "They can only stand red light." page 11
The novel starts out by describing the fertilization process of a certain society in the year A.F. 632. Human embryos, of which so many regard currently as a biological miracle, are compared to the photographs. This comparison effectually dehumanizes human life, as if it where as only significant as the process of developing photos. This dehumanization is markedly present throughout chapter one. In fact, on page 12, the development of these embryos is described at length in a manner which brings to mind a conveyor belt, which demeans these human embryos to the status of perishable consumer products. The author, on page 7, directly states this. "The principle of mass production at last applied to biology." The purpose of the first chapter is to introduce this new kind of world. An orderly world in which it is socially acceptable, in fact probably required, to mass produce human life on conveyor belts, and a world in which "the lower the caste," "the shorter the oxygen," meaning human life is purposely engineered in the developing stages to satisfy certain predetermined social classes (the intellectutaly inferior epsilons, for example).
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