The world is in the grip of genetic devolution in this radio adaptation of prolific US author Louise Erdrich’s new novel, a wide-ranging treatise on the nature of motherhood, family, culture and clan set in a contemporary America torn apart by the mounting threat to human survival.  

It’s all but impossible to think about the theme of human reproduction in jeopardy without bringing to mind Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale or P D James’ The Children of Men. Yet given the richness of the subject matter (human beings struggling to create the next generation of their kind), it’s perhaps surprising that this particular threat to humankind’s survival is not reflected more frequently in the creative vision of science fiction writers.

This story is narrated by the character of Cedar Hawk Songmaker, the adopted daughter of principled Minneapolis liberals, whose unplanned pregnancy encourages her to seek out her biological parents. Her mother is Ojibweg, part of the Anishinaabeg group of Indigenous Peoples in North America, and reveals to her a very different familial tradition to the one she grew up in.

But all of US society is fast unravelling in the face of plummeting birth rates, childhood deformities and maternal deaths. Songmaker hides her impending motherhood whilst stocking up on supplies and hunkering down. Back in the city, she reconnects with her ex-partner and the father of her child and prepares to make a break for the border. Federal authorities, increasingly controlled by religious fundamentalists, want to put all pregnant women under lock and key so that the state can take control of all healthy newborns.

Part-way through, the plot flips on a key event and takes the story in a new direction. The first half of the tale uses the framework of the reproductive catastrophe afflicting the world to reflect on questions of biology and identity, ponder on the balance between “nature and nurture” in defining an individual, and consider the role that extended family culture plays in shaping a person’s sense of kith and kin.

The second half of the book is much more in the style of a sci-fi thriller, focusing on the efforts of a minority of mothers-to-be to flout the authorities’ demands, exposing the costs that accrue to such resistance and the terrible fate that can await compliant and defiant pregnant women alike when the genetic die is cast.

Cherrelle Skeete does a great job of bringing Erdrich’s characterisation to life. Her voice is equally at home narrating the philosophical and the action components of the story. This ten-part production very effectively pulls the listener in to identify with Cedar’s plight, as time and again her personal story hovers on the brink of disaster. While the picture that Erdrich’s paints of the global reproductive calamity is incomplete, there is an emotionally literate texture to the whole piece; even if the two phases of the story don’t completely gel.

FUTURE HOME OF THE LIVING GOD (DANGEROUS VISIONS) / BBC RADIO 4 / WRITER: LOUISE ERDRICH / ABRIDGED BY: JEREMY OSBORNE / PRODUCER: LISA OSBORNE/ READ BY: CHERRELLE SKEETE / AVAILABLE ON BBC IPLAYER