There is the general spoiler page for general questions.
I’m making this set of pages for more specific questions.
The rule is: do not ask or comment about a book until it has been at least a month in issue. I think that will make everybody happy re spoilers.
Partners – I get the impression that cohabiting with your partner is very rare indeed for spacers. In Merchanter’s Luck, there’s only one non-Reilly on board Dublin. Spacers seem to make do with chance encounters on dockside and put Family before personal relationships.
Accents – on the family ships, wouldn’t you get a Family accent? There’s certainly several mentions of coded ship-speak that’s unique to the ship in question, so I suppose a specific ship accent is quite possible.
Anf finally, Fletcher Niehart. I think he managed to turn his back on Downbelow simply because he found a place he felt he really belonged.
about eccents: you think black market guy bought what Fletcher fed him about him being Boreale crew? I guess he didnt recognize the eccent. remembering Fletcher have Pell station accent.
about spacers and partners, Quen left her ship for love. I guess she wasnt theonly one doing it. (Alison Reilly did it as well, waking out of Dublin). but is it common to bring into the ship youre partner and live there (remember Austin Bowe and his wife)?
I forgot about Quen, but it’s still very rare. Alison didn’t do it for love, she did it to get a shortcut to a command seat, and Corinthian isn’t really a family ship – it uses hired crew.
Didn’t Alison have a steady relationship with someone off a ship called Silvereyes? They met up whenever their ships paths happened to cross.
I think that Dublin had one non-Reilly on board out of 1000 crew, so it’s probably a pretty low incidence.
Don’t forget that Ship/Family are incredibly important to spacers. To leave your ship is major life-changing thing to do, equivalent to emigrating to another country for us, with the added kick that your own family will be completely out of touch almost all of the time. No phones or emails in space!
now, does cyteen spacers have different eccent then spacers originated in pell or mariner?
I mean, fletcher has Pell staioner accent so its different from cyteen eccent.
Especially given that Cyteen Station probably doesn’t speak English. Not as the main language anyway- Alliance is English based, but Union uses some sort of Slavic creole.
Maybe Fletcher was faking a Slavic accent that whole time? 😀 I’m now envisioning that conversation taking place with a bad Hollywood Russian accent, like Chekov in Star Trek.
Elene Quen wasn’t necessarily planning to leave permanently, either- it just turned out that way when her ship blew up without her. But she was still trying to decide. I’ve always thought that must have been incredibly awkward for Damon, never knowing if she was staying with him by choice or because her entire Family was dead.
Why do you say that? Union has the same space-based roots as Alliance, it’s a political entity, not an ethnic one. Granted, you get some slavic names, but I bet you that English is the language used. For one thing, a common tongue would be an operational and trading requirement. Emory and Warwick are good English names, Reilly is Irish. On Pell, you’ve got Konstantin (Greek?) and Lucy is run by a Kreja (Hungarian?).
National languages may well survive aboard the ships for private use (Austin Bowe’s missus uses French for instance) but I should think English is the standard across both Alliance and Union.
Going on the assumption that English will remain the international language for pilots, flying and business in general I agree with you, Spiderdavon. There will probably be local dialects, but in international areas I think dialects would even out. Witness how North American English has homogenized since the advent of television.
Why do you say that?
‘Cause I asked Herself upthread. 😀 Check out the post at the top of this page.
…One rather gets the impression that the Alliance/Unionverse is some sort of alternate universe in which the Soviet Union lasted longer than it did on our Earth, preventing the US from attaining global hegemony in the 1990s. For one thing, the space program has to continue, and we seem to have slowed down dramatically now that we no longer have an arch-rival to impress. Alpha Station’s supposed to be go out 10 years from now, and nothing like that’s even on the horizon.
For another, there’s the Union language issue. I’m guessing Cyteen wasn’t a totally Soviet/Russian project, because they would have insisted on Cyrillic but the pro-Roman alphabet faction clearly prevailed. So there’s plenty of room for Carnaths and Strassens and Corains or whoever. But the guys naming all the cities were clearly Russian.
Oops – missed that one. My apologies. I am puzzled though, since that post implies colonisation directly from parts of Earth, rather than what I understood was more a movement of disaffected engineers and scientists from the EC stations of the Hinder Stars.
As far as the “official” A/U timeline is concerned, we should have launched the first unmanned interstellar probe 5 years ago. I guess sci-fi writers are optimists…
Is there somewhere on Closed Circle where I could see CJ’s books sorted by a) in the pipeline for Closed Circle, b) no current plans to upload to Closed Circle. Merchanters Luck is a favorite of mine. I was wondering if we could look forward to a downloadable version any time soon.
Merchanter’s Luck—nothing in the immediate future, which is pretty well true of most DAW Books for a combination of reasons. I am needing to sit down with the contracts, figure out which contract is for which book (they’re A, B, C) in the contracts—and then make myself a list of what I can legally do—there’s more than 60 books with a patchwork of contracts, and for various reasons including publisher politics I don’t want to put a list out there at this stage. I don’t, however, rule out continuing books where the publishers claim e-rights. There is nothing that obligates me to sell anything to them.
Oops – missed that one. My apologies.
No worries. I assumed everyone spoke English too, until I noticed it was “ser, seri” instead of “ser, sers.”
I am puzzled though, since that post implies colonisation directly from parts of Earth, rather than what I understood was more a movement of disaffected engineers and scientists from the EC stations of the Hinder Stars.
I reckon some of the immigrant communities remained cohesive. Certainly the ships are like that, and probably the stationers too- so if you had a bunch of people on Mariner who wanted to move out to a new station, it might well be all the Eastern Europeans on the station (or all the Koreans of whatever) rather than a demographically random selection of Mariners. And then when you’re trying to pick the official language for your new station, are you going to choose English, everyone’s second language, or are you going to choose the Slavic creole that you’ve been using to talk to one another anyway?
Hell, for all we know, Pell’s the only English based station and Thule uses German, Mariner Chinese, etc, depending on the ethnic makeup of the initial colonization party.
Certainly the ships remained cohesive, but then the crews developed into extended families. I suppose that when the original station modules were pushed into place, having an ethnically cohesive crew would have been seen as being more stable, and as the stations grew that ethnicity would be passed on. I’d be interested to know how much of the population growth in the Beyond was down to immigration and how much due to natural increase. Probably a strong bias towards the latter given the cost of shipping people and life-support vs inert goods.
Perhaps Pell and Cyteen were the first truly multi-cultural stations?
I’d be interested to know how much of the population growth in the Beyond was down to immigration and how much due to natural increase.
Well, Earthside put a moratorium on emigration pretty early on, so after that it would have to be natural increase.
Judging by who has big station shares at the time of DBS, Pell seems like it must have been at least somewhat mixed- as a surname Konstantin has that weirdly truncated Ellis Island vibe to it, Dee is English and Lukas could be anything, and we know the lingua franca is English, but everyone is running around with Italian first names.
Some mixing must have happened in the Cyteen population at some point, but it’s not clear when- the first generation already has Olga Emory, whose name is a Russian/English combo, but who gives her daughter a French name and gets called “Mother” in French. Maybe they’re White Russian? 😀
I ran the population numbers once. Immigration combined with natural increase (not to mention Union’s wild population increase, using azi-to-cit transitions) can go pretty wild pretty fast. The ships don’t increase population too much: Dublin’s situation is typical of the problems. Not to mention Corinthian’s. But stations just add on new pieces and fatten their ring to a cylinder when they need to expand, so they don’t mind much.
Cyteen’s founders were mostly scientists and others who ran before the emigration embargo slammed down—they were disaffected when they left Earth and were more so as Earth began to make life difficult for the Beyond.
One of the reasons I got interested in genealogy, besides a family bent in that direction, was understanding colonial populations. Take my own lot: a few Puritans, a lot of Quakers trying to dodge and outpopulate the Puritans, a clutch of former Quakers who’d become outcast for marrying outside the community, who didn’t like either lot, retreated to the outback, then tried to rejoin the British army and get a commission—failing that, they took the other side during the Revolution, and these were the descendants of Quakers (who are pacifists). They were having 10 kids per family, reused names over and over and over, in every generation of every family—but there were a lot of them, and in 200 years they’d gone from Pennsylvania as a completely undeveloped forest to Arkansas and Oklahoma and Texas as frontiers. There’d been 4 wars and a lot of water under the bridge by that time, and at 10 kids per family every 30 years or so, they multiplied. Not to mention the Dutch, who were in favor of large families, too. So you can get a large population pretty fast, counting they started reproducing at 18-20 and sometimes had serial marriages (widows and widowers tended to remarry and keep reproducing despite lousy survival rates in childbirth and annual outbreaks of disease.) Those wooden ships couldn’t bring in THAT many people.
As for the makeup of Cyteen, remember Ari’s observation that the original Cyteen stationers were up to their hips in physicists but had trouble finding anybody to fix the plumbing.
I have been pondering the economics of azi. I can see the potential benefit to having a population tailor-made for what you need, but who pays for the cost of doing that? I mean, the numbers I’ve seen for “cost to raise a child to 18” seem to be all over the place, but 120K is a very low end estimate from what I see. So, say that I want 10 assembly-line workers. That’s 1,200,000 dollars. And that doesn’t include the costs for the artificial wombs, the medical staff salaries, the supervisor salaries, support staff salaries, or the R&D costs for tape and gene sets. Does the plant owner pay the cost (make this perilously close to slavery), is it government sponsored, or is Reseune just that benevolent of a company?
CYteen does what it does because it collects a heckuva lot of money from its patents and from government funding through the Science Bureau.
Cost to raise a child to 18 is not 120K in, say, Botswana. Most azi do light work from childhood—patrolling for weeds in the crops, pig-herding, just sitting and watching things that have to be watched: an azi child is quite capable of sticking to the job. The plant owner pays Cyteen, not the azi, and also is frequently inspected, often BY azi, who know how to ask the right questions, and will bring in a supervisor if warranted: no sane azi can lie to a supervisor.
Once an azi gets cit status, life changes radically, and he gets a salary, is responsible for finding and paying for an apartment, for his own transport—and he doesn’t get happy-tape any more: he just has to cope—but has gotten tape explaining how to do this. He can go in at any time for some help, but the object of the azi is to move most out to cit status if their area is developed enough—say one of the towns—to make that possible. At that point they marry, have kids, and pay taxes like regular cits—they’re responsible for bringing up cit kids, and will have Cyteen assistance if they’re not coping well. Plus if they need psychological support, a note will go on their genotype record, and it could affect handling of others of their geneset. A breakdown would indicate a deep investigation into why.
Natural increase it is then. I suppose with better medical techniques child-bearing will remain possible for longer, and infant mortality would be very low indeed. Families seem to be quite loosely knit, so I wonder if stations raised the kids in creches?
What would be typical crew numbers in a station start-up module? I’m just wondering how deep the gene pool was. Clearly the colonists and spacers would be genetically healthy, but with a ship call only every year or so there’s little chance of new blood.
Alliance-side, which is different, and relying on natural increase, they’re usually several hundred, which will be augmented fairly soon by various immigrants—miners, technicians. Getting in on a station-share at the founding of a station is guaranteeing a pretty cushy life for your offspring: station shares are reckoned by how many v the station economy, and as the station grows and builds, more shares can be issued, but they are also inherited. That’s the one brake on station growth: how many kids can get a proper station-share, and what are the prospects of new shares being issued.
On Unionside, you tell Reseune how many azi you need, they arrive with suitable skills, and they don’t get station shares until they go cit.
Once an azi gets cit status
How often was this actually happening, though? Because Grant talks about it as if it were incredibly rare, if we take Port of Eternity and Serpent’s Reach as still fully canon, something obviously went terribly wrong with azi emancipation somewhere along the line. As one would expect it to, given human nature and the prospect of having a slave class that was psychologically incapable of rebellion.
Or did a lot of azi get CIT-tape in the beginning, when they needed CITs to populate Novgorod, but if you were
bornum, decanted into Grant’s generation you were pretty much screwed for life?Getting in on a station-share at the founding of a station is guaranteeing a pretty cushy life for your offspring
I’ve always wondered about this. Are there stationers with no shares at all? What happens to these people? And do shares act like shares in an American company, where holding a lot essentially enables you to make political decisions for the whole station? How do they reconcile that with democracy?
And aren’t the Konstantins livid that Elene wants Alicia to sell her share for a transient, worthless-to-stationers ship, thereby stripping the whole family of a fourth of their voting block?
No, no, it’s routine. In Serpent’s reach, it’s not Union using azi tech, but Alliance getting hold of it. In Port Eternity, it’s just flat illegal use.
Azi going to cit is the expected route: about 10-15 years of work, and, depending on the economics of the area, you’ll get cit tape. This increases the consumer base, which is the desired effect. The larger the consumer base, the higher the tech that it can support. Azi that don’t tend to go to cit are employed in places like Reseune. Reseune azi don’t make that shift until they’re shipped out, and some few are—mostly as supervisors somewhere under the ultimate supervisory grade of Reseune-trained cits, who are the azi’s equivalent of psychologists. Generally Reseune azi resist being shipped out, because you don’t get some of the bennies Reseune azi get—in the cold colonial world outside, you work harder, meet more frustration (the subway in Novgorod is one,) have to take increasing responsibilities leading up to CIT tape, which they are taught to think is a good thing, but they’d rather not have the frustration part—coping with frustration is a CIT talent azi don’t have to have. If they’re frustrated, they ask for a supervisor, and the supervisor solves it.
Grant’s a special case—you’d call him a Special if he were cit, which he devoutly hopes not to be. As it is, he’s an alpha, a walking computer with an attitude and creativity, and he loves what he does, and enjoys having Justin to handle all the citty stuff, rhymes with you-know-what. This leaves him to do exactly what he wants to do, which is mess with computers and population dynamics. He considers he is mankind’s next step. Justin disagrees, but it’s hard to argue with a guy who thinks Justin is the poor downtrodden work force. Fix me dinner. Buy me lunch. Turn on the vid, there’s a nice fellow—pick us out something nice to watch. All that’s Justin’s job when Grant’s thinking.
Betas aren’t quite up to considering themselves perfect. There are always alphas to take that role. But they know what they know and they’re quite proud of it. Pride is one of those things reward-tape installs, but its still a very pleasant emotion.
As for station-shares, you have to have one to live there. But you can have multiples, as station-shares split like other kinds of shares, and the longer your family has lived on a station, the better off you tend to be, unless you can ‘buy in’ with several shares. It’s the same as purchasing any stock: you can buy in to a little station cheaper than you can buy in to Pell, and a Pell share guarantees you certain basics: food at a certain class of restaurant, clothes of a certain class of shop, housing of a certain class. You don’t really pay for these ‘basics’. But if you want better, you have to save the cash chits that you can get for extra work, superior performance, productivity, overtime, and in some cases, carrying extra jobs or…playing the commodity market, not recommended for the novices. The station council handles economic balance, making sure Pell’s rep for good ‘basics’ stays up to snuff and that the distribution of station shares is not concentrating. There’s a complex formula that dictates how many shares you can own, based on number in issue, and how many you were born with versus how many you’ve bought.
I had always understood that both Ari I and Ari II were trying to bring back the diversity of population that had been sifted out by everything that lead up to Cyteen’s foundation – that really, what they were doing should be seen as honorable, making Union more representative of humanity as a whole, and not the highly specialized mess that Alliance sounds like it’s going to become. For that matter, I wonder if Ari I didn’t put together the Gehennan sets in such a way to make Alliance a little less crazy than it could’ve been. And it’s broadly hinted that there are other events like Gehenna going on as far as we can tell that aren’t yet discovered in Ari II’s time – but this is based on my not-so-recent reading of 40k in Gehenna… so, there you go.
Serpent’s Reach has always struck me as being provided the embryos by someone like Bucherlabs or someone else less principled than Reseune. Bucherlabs and the others struck me as the WalMarts to Reseune’s Macy’s.
and Re station shares: I had imagined that someone in the Konstantin-Dee clan would’ve snatched up Alicia’s station share if she ever sold it – because they wouldn’t give up their voting power.
And what happened to all of the stationshares of the folks in Rimrunners when Thule was sent spinning off to burn up in Ross 248?
Given that cits have to deal with frustration, and don’t get good tape, and azi are designed and conditioned to want to do what ever it is that they are assigned to, why would they WANT to become cits? Or is it forced on them? That was one of the things that always bothered me about azi. You have a slave class that LIKES being slaves, because they have been psychologically conditioned to it. Why is your average azi factory worker going to want to go become a cit, when they will most likely wind up doing exactly what they are as an azi, and have all the downside of cit emotions to deal with?
That issue is somewhat echoed by the officer in charge of the Gehenna mission: he’s not used to azi, and the fact they’re the happiest people he’s ever met really bugs him.
Azi are told that cit status is part of their future, and are given tape to encourage them increasingly to look forward to it as it comes closer to reality. There are of course nice things about parenthood and total freedom/responsibility, and pride does not disappear from the equation; those destined to be cit now have the ‘create’ and ‘maintain’ ethics added to their mindset, and they are taught that stress is the downside of this and that they should deal with it as a part of their personal growth. They have an ethic that regards their genotype: that if they are quite good this encourages the production of more like them, and they want this. So even when upset, their overcoming this gives them the warm-fuzzy of a personal victory…which will be confirmed at their next supervisor visit. They don’t outgrow those—but they become less and less frequent as time passes.
Alphas like Grant are, remember, running this process, so it’s far more transparent to them, and they also have an option not to go cit if they don’t want to. Take Ollie for an example. Jane Strassen was the love of his life, and when she died, he took cit tape because she wanted him to: she wanted him to continue her work with the authority to have the say over it, and she did not want him being brought back to Cyteen under the authority of Denys Nye. He’s never married—he’s pretty old—and he has no kids; he runs the Science wing where he is, and enjoys the creative end of things and is greatly respected and looked-to for advice, but he still misses her and tells himself someday he’ll go home. Being an alpha he is now counted a sort of Special, and has everything he could want, materially, but still lives modestly and efficiently, is not distracted by ‘things’, and his ambitions right now are to have his department running well. His frustrations include Jane’s relatives—he’d like to drown Gloria—but his satisfactions include several betas he works with, who make him pyschologically comfortable. They aren’t supposed to. But alphas do a lot of things they’re not supposed to, and so do Specials. He is encouraged by what he hears of Ari II, but he does not absolutely trust anybody in Reseune.
So… if they didn’t have tape telling them they wanted to be cits, they wouldn’t? Makes the situation in Serpent’s Reach all the more plausible.
And you know the truly spooky thought that just came to me (and I don’t know why it didn’t sooner!)…. happy azi factory workers are one thing. But there are azi soldiers… and what happens when you have a group of happy azi soldiers, who like what they do and are very good at it? That seems like a really bad idea.
“he does not absolutely trust anyone in Resune”
Erm isn’t that true of everyone involved in Resune? Sort of the second motto?
More of a mode-de-vie I must say, living in Reseune at least at the times of these stories is quite cloak and dagger – although I think that in Ari1’s time it was much better, and hopefully, after present troubles with the Paxers, Khalid, et al subside, it’ll be better for much of Ari2’s tenure.
In the books you’re getting the omniscient overview of the Azi/Cit system.
In Serpents Reach you can see how the ability to breed and condition a
population can be used to create subservience as an internal state. The
Union azi conditioning is to make cits out of artificial womb babies who
lack parents, all of their tape is to supply the missing parents with a
substitution system that is created and maintained by the smartest people
in Union. Adults azi and cits make choices based on their individual
internalizations of their experiences, societies use millions of external
pressures to curb and sway the individuals in them. Deviance moves to the
frontier, but societies cannot function well when everyone is deviant. So
the scientific answer is sociogenesis using the azi (known quantity) to
make the stable population to counterbalance the Union migrant deviants.
Azi becoming cits is moral in the sense of morals being there for survival.
Ariane One was in her inner core a deeply moral being, regardless of how
her enemies saw her. She possesses the ability that really highly intelligent
have of seeing the world as it is rather than the way it ought to be.
The Bardic tradition is to spin a tale simple enough to enthrall audiences
out of the truly complex world we live in. I think we haven’t seen the last
of Emory just yet.
GRIN
I had always understood it as a bunch of essentially normal azi with a consumerist bent that was passed on down the line – to me it seemed like a very Union setup, but with a painful capitalistic slant to it.
Maybe a stupied question
was Josh Talley an Azi?
Not by birth. The techniques that create an azi were used to create a government agent/spy/saboteur/operative who could change identity…but who became detached from the people who should be managing him. On his own, he was left believing the cover story he had been given.
Is that then true of Mindwipe candidates to some extent? Born-men rewired to some level as azi?
Ideally, wiped only as to a specific memory or the intensity of that memory—which can be for therapy. A thorough mindwipe is for a badly screwed-up individual who presumably will receive chemical therapy and be rebuilt, psychologically speaking—for instance, if you were dealing with Jeffrey Daumer, or Ted Bundy—how would you unwire that attitude and the reinforcing chemistry that goes with it? You have to wipe certain memories, insert others, and hammer them home chemically, with a cocktail of hormones potent enough to override the rest. If you have an individual who has a real deficiency of, say, the impulse override, and there’s no way to rebuild the brain—you have to do something to avoid locking the subject in a small box for the rest of his life, or worse, letting him loose with no brakes on the kill-impulse. So you opt to protect society: you take measures that will shut him down if he gets overwrought—. Better his permanently diminished capacity and occasional bout of whatever-works than some innocent kid being killed.
CJ, What goods did Sol Station actually get from the Scientists out on the Great Circle? What things did they come up with? I’ve wondered how it’s viable, that way.