Vince
asked
Lois McMaster Bujold:
Heard a podcast from the Progress Educational Trust in the UK, wherein five academics present on the legacy of JBS Haldane's 1923 lecture/text, Daedalus. Haldane pioneered the idea of in vitro fertilization and exo-gestation. Your exploration of these themes in the Vorkosiverse sprang to mind. Thought you might enjoy it and PET's content generally. Are you aware of them? Podcast TinyURL: https://tinyurl.com/yc7bxhru
Lois McMaster Bujold
Don't know PET -- thanks for the heads-up -- but this does suggest where Aldous Huxley got the idea for his 1932 SF novel Brave New World. Which is the earliest place I, and I suspect a lot of other SF writers, got the idea for what is now a fairly standard genre trope for anyone who thinks about future biology in any depth.
My uterine replicators are actually a bit of a conscious argument with Huxley -- it's been decades since I read his book, but my young Midwestern mind was left with the impression that he used the technology as an exploration of specifically British class tensions, alien to me, but, fair, that sort of political allegory is what a lot of SF does. But I thought, yeah, but what would real people do, for which my first and ongoing answer was "not just one thing, but all of the things". So I've tried to include as many different uses and social consequences as I could think of.
Ta, L.
My uterine replicators are actually a bit of a conscious argument with Huxley -- it's been decades since I read his book, but my young Midwestern mind was left with the impression that he used the technology as an exploration of specifically British class tensions, alien to me, but, fair, that sort of political allegory is what a lot of SF does. But I thought, yeah, but what would real people do, for which my first and ongoing answer was "not just one thing, but all of the things". So I've tried to include as many different uses and social consequences as I could think of.
Ta, L.
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Lois McMaster Bujold:
Hi Lois!I was in a bit of a funk so I reread Cordelia's Honor and caught a few things that I hadn't noticed before. I will have a separate post for each. #3 What exactly IS a flimsy? I keep thinking I have it figured out from context, but in Barrayar, Kly is carrying stuff in a flimsy (the snacks he gives to Gregor, the gum leaf). I can't imagine how the flimsy I had been imagining could be used as a container.
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Lois McMaster Bujold:
Hi, Lois, thanks for your habitual championing of Patricia Wrede's blog, it was through you that I discovered the veritable goldmine of writing info. It took several weeks but I started at the oldest post and made my way pretty much through all (hundreds) of her posts. I felt like I read a voluminous novel on writing technique but I feel like I've learned an unquantifiable number of things. She's a brilliant didact. ?
Georgy Iliev
asked
Lois McMaster Bujold:
Hi Lois, as I recently saw a youtube series about "The Truth about Space War" - the channel's name is Because Science - I came to realize I think I've read that somewhere in the books. In Mirror Dance I remember Mark recalling "The weapons were supposed to cook everyone neatly, like eggs in their shells". Considering he's from a universe in the future how scientifically aimed was that statement?
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