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.
More Answered Questions
Meredith Mansfield
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Lois McMaster Bujold:
I'm in the middle of rereading The Warrior's Apprentice now. I was struck when Elena tells Miles that Baz has made up his own story about who Miles is--that he's essentially exiled for being a mutie and his younger brother has ursurped his place. Minus the exile, that's pretty close to Ser Galen's plot. Did you know that already when you wrote The Warrior's Apprentice?
Talli Ruksas
asked
Lois McMaster Bujold:
Is Aral's middle name Selig, making it actually little Selig's middle name? If so, what is his first name? Or is it Grandpa Sasha's middle name? Or did they not go with tradition? I know it's certainly a name in Vorkosigan history. You use a lot of British idioms in the V books - is that to give them a certain "not from around here" flavor, or just phrases you yourself use, or?
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