Book review:

Sex Robots &

Vegan Meat by Jenny Kleeman.

– Stig Abell

Adventures at the frontier of birth, food, sex and death in Sex Robots & Vegan Meat. ‘The future is a fairly scary place, but there is no better guide to it than Jenny Kleeman. By turns alarming, funny, thoughtprovoking and fascinating, this is a book that brilliantly shows us where much of our life (and death) is heading.’

THIS BOOK is not science fiction. Technology is redefining every aspect of our lives and, according to Jenny Kleeman, birth, death, food and sex is where all the big stuff is happening, right now.

In her new book, Sex Robots & Vegan Meat, Kleeman travels across four continents and visits the darkest parts of the internet to explore the inventions that will fundamentally change what it means to live and die. In the book, she speaks to scientists, humanoids, designers, ethicists, entrepreneurs and provocateurs, people who strongly believe that technology can let us have the lives we truly desire without sacrifice. Intrigued yet?

This sensational book will change how you think about lab-grown meat (and the idea of clean meat) as well as the business of baby carrying. The biobag, for example, is the most literal manifestation of how pregnancy is becoming externalised. It’s ‘ectogenesis’ – reproduction happening outside the human body. Could women become obsolete? And then there’s the section on the future of death, which unpacks everything from DIY deaths to the Elon Musk of suicide.

Kleeman’s visual journey brings up many questions. What motivates these inventors? Why are they mostly men? What kind of person devotes their life to building a death machine? And who is campaigning against these advances? Are robots an ideal outlet for the lonely and companionless?

Before birth, food, sex and death are changed forever, significant hurdles will need to be crossed. Several of the inventions Kleeman talks about are still in the prototype stage and others await FDA approval. (She did, however, eat a very expensive cultured chicken nugget.) It’s a handbook about sustainability, environmentalism, ethics and global food reform … but will we, as human beings, be able to get over both the yuck- and the ick factors that come with many of these radical and outlandish inventions?

Sex Robots & Vegan Meat is an unforgettable, unputdownable, well-researched and -written book. If you have not read Kleeman’s award-winning work before, be prepared to be shocked, surprised, and left with a desire to learn more.

Sex Robots & Vegan Meat (Pan Macmillan) is out now and available at all good bookstores, and online.