My futurismic column for this month deals with animal intelligence –it’s entitled “What are the Animals Becoming?”  I just popped over to Nancy Kress’s blog to see how she’s doing, and it turns out she just blogged on the same topic (or at least mentioned the prevalence of stories about genetically altered animals in her blog entry titled Good Stories).

I have a novel about that (The Downbelow Girls) which doesn’t yet have a pub date, and I’ve tried multiple times to write stories about border collies with opposable thumbs.  There is one in the novel, but I haven’t pulled off a good short yet.

It does seem to be a theme in current work.  Maybe because the animals really are getting smarter, or maybe because we really, really want them to.   Maybe both.

I have noticed that often a topic seems to attract a lot of us writers  at once.  Maybe a hundredth monkey thing.  Maybe a bit of magic, or maybe it’s just in the air.