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.
Ultimately, trading in patents and information is valuable: new industries and processes spring from that. But the scientists in question were anything from far-out theoretical guys to more hands-on types doing research. There’s a reason the FTL drive was discovered and developed in the Beyond, not on Earth.
One has to wonder – is there a short-story about Estelle Bok out there, somewhere?
Ari2 could seed various Bok clones out amongst the starships – her attempt to redeem the Bok clone experiment that ended so badly for the first clone.
Hm… how would that work? Bok lived pre-FTL so there was much time spent cooped up in a tin-can. Current ship life is such that Bok wouldn’t spend a great deal of time cooped up – she’d be in and out of the ship. She’d feel the flow of space, and such, and maybe, just maybe, that would be all she’d need. But from the sound of it, there seems to be a fair-sized nurture component for Ari2.
I wonder if she could work out some sort of deal with the an Alliance or Union family ship like Dublin? Something with an internal dynamic like that which Bok would’ve experienced in her formative years.
I had always understood Bok to be a member of some family ship, not a stationer who had up and left somewhere, but then again, could she have been?
It would be interesting to see Ari and Justin, maybe Yanni undertake to replicate Bok’s experience, or see what sort of experience she’d need? Could they maybe create a Bok clone, but have her live most of her life without knowing it, just guide her to adulthood or young adulthood where she learns just who she is genetically?
Interesting idea.
FWIW, I see Ari2 as having the audace to do that. Cloning Bok a taboo? She’d still give it a try. And if Estelle didn’t turn out to be a genius the 2nd time around, let her live her life as Estelle Riley or whatever.
The Bok clone was a pianist who was not happy in life. (Cyteen).
Well – yes, that Bok clone. But that was before the success of psychogenesis and they realized that throwing a geneset into a vastly different environment during the formative years wouldn’t produce the desired results – hence my suggestion that Ari2 might consider farming out the raising of a new Bok clone in secret to some family like Dublin or someone, where the child gets the same or similar life experiences that Bok-Prime did – or even sending the child up to Reseune or Fargone, and then ships the child around star-stations on Dublin later – whatever she can do to approximate the life-experiences, since the biochem doesn’t seem to be as hugely important as a week-to-week monitoring.
I figure that Bok-Prime didn’t have a lot of media attention, lived a relatively quiet life on stations, and then emigrated further out toward the frontier. Maybe giving Bok3 an experience like living at Reseune-Fargone and then moving her out to Eversnow or further down that chain to give her the life experiences that would shape her better than Bok2 and the media circus and life on Cyteen Station or Cyteen-proper did.
Good idea (farming out a Bok clone to a ship). One of the tragic things IRL
is that the media and becoming famous does no one any favours.
The litany of people who were stuck in a zoo as an exhibit after becoming
discovered is hard to think about.
I seem to remember that keeping the Reuben 1 and 2 apart was considered a
high priority. Quite possibly because of the level of expectation forced
on Bok 2.
It does have interesting possibilities to explore because the balance in the
disturbance of society caused against the considerable contributions of the
genius is worth taking a look at.
Ari 2 has one of those to contend with, Denis Nye is a valuable mind with a
lot of less than virtuous qualities.
I’d imagine that every living philosopher at Godels birth would have cheerfully
strangled him to stop his destruction of the foundations of their thought.
A conservative society that understands this would cull such people ruthlessly.
@Ragi Deviance in eastern euro terms is usually expressed as rabid capitalism,
Rand is a classic example of the genre. The modern Corporate/consumer dynamic
isn’t exactly capitalism anymore either, since corporations function more like
multicellular creatures grazing on single celled creatures in symbiosis.
@Philosopher77 Azi soldiers happy with what they do are not any scarier than
cits. You need to meet someone from the French Foreign Legion to see what I
mean. It would make a lot more sense to be afraid of misguided/incompetent
politicians who misuse the military.
I seem to recall that azi soldiers were more apt to question their orders if
they didn’t seem to make sense, a virtue codified in the US Navy…GRIN
I just wonder what happens when Ari 2 crashes into something she can’t fix
and is forced to compromise.
I do wonder what happens to a society that concentrates so much on recreating/extending Specials. After all, the first Bok was just a random happening. If you spend all your time and effort trying to recreate her, how many other people do you wind up not discovering? After all, the second Bok was a good pianist, and that is valuable as long as you aren’t expecting her to be a math genius. Seems to me that doing too much psychogenesis might result in a society becoming stale.
I guess one of the things that must be very hard for someone involved in cloning is to resist the temptation to unleash a series of copies of themselves into different environments just to see how they might have turned out. Not to mention the option of making some money by doing bootleg copies of famous people. Want to have someone with the body of the top actress of the day but dumb as bunny? Resune might be able to resist the need – but some of the other labs would have less scruples. And what the Alliance or Earth would do with the technology would be mind boggling.
With regards to the Bok clone, I think Ari 2 said somewhere that part of the reason why Bok2 didn’t work out was not just the media attention – you are a failure can you tell us why you are a failure – but also that she didn’t know things on an instinctive level like being in space and the decisions being life and death. It would just take one Bok clone to expand on the work of the Bok-1 and then Union is in a very strong position and able to deal with the risk of humans being spread to far and thin. If it takes years to get back and forth to Eversnow, if Bok-n could come up with a way of pumping out a FTL message without using a ship, or a more efficient or faster jump, that could go along way to address Ari-1’s concerns over population dilution and information flow.
Apf, who needs ‘dumb as a bunny”? If it is an azi, you can program it to love you and be smart, too… I guess. Unless DAAB does it for you, I suppose! 😛
I feel bad for the clones, myself. Can you imagine living a life where everyone expects and wants you to be an extension of someone else? Seems like you would get at least a few clones that decide to do something entirely different just to establish that they are an individual, and not just Bok version 24.
Thanks for the clarification, Cherryh-nandi. 🙂
As for station-shares, you have to have one to live there
This is what troubles me. Suppose you’re a lowly dockworker, recently naturalized from Q, and you only have your one basic station share. Suppose you get pregnant (off a spacer, let’s say, so Dad’s out of the picture.) Your kid needs a station share to have Pell citizenship, but he can’t inherent one of yours because you only have the one. What happens to him? Does the station automatically grant him a share? In that case you’ve devalued the shares of everyone else on the station just by having a child, which can’t possibly go over well with your fellow citizens. Is he stateless until your share acquires enough value to split and you can give him one? What if he’s a brat and you’d like to disinherit him? Does Mom have to give up a share if Dad’s a citizen too, or is there like station-share alimony?
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.
So say Alliance, anyway. But isn’t that essentially what Florian and Catlin are? Which may be an example of why it’s a really bad idea, come to think about it.
Re. Bok- it’s not obvious they need another Bok. In order to continue the sociogenesis project Ari I needed (or thought she needed) another Ariane Emory, but they’ve already got the Bok equation and a Bok clone would be highly intelligent no matter what field she went into. It seems to me that rather than worrying about psychogenesis (since it’s going to be impossible to get the endocrine levels right on a FTL ship anyway), they’d be better served to just let them pursue their own interests, possibly without even telling them they’re clones. You could make them look a little different as a disguise.
(Denys, too. Why does Ari II need another one? Since Florian and Caitlin essentially murdered Denys for no reason, given what we now know about the source of Kyle’s orders, creating a baby with a vested interest in finding out how Denys I died seems like a Bad Idea. I get the impression it’s Ari’s control fetish acting up again- she can read Denys so she’d rather have a Denys than someone new- plus she kind of promised him before she murdered him, but seriously, not a good plan. Modify that gene set so it has red hair and rename it Danil or something. It’s too late for Giraud II, but she doesn’t have to traumatize a fourth kid by making him a PR.)
WHen you are born, you live on your parent’s station-share until you are old enough to be emancipated from parental care. A single-share woman who produces multiple children will still have to support them within that station-share, so you can reproduce your way into financial distress…at which point you are reckoned incompetent to manage this aspect of your life, and you enter the legal system, not in a good way. The court will take over your personal life, and the court takes guardianship of your children to assure that they will not suffer from the situation. Reproducing on a space station without being able to support a child makes you a serious problem. A stationer is not apt to sleepover with a spacer—not even apt to go into the places where spacers cohabit. Spacers are just as touchy about reproduction, because wild reproduction in a confined economy can ruin everybody. You are free to do what you want, but only IF you have the economic latitude. For a stationer or a spacer, reproducing with no means to support the child is rated really, really bad. And in the way of things, it is still the woman’s responsibility: a spacer male isn’t going to check the spacer female’s papers to find out if she’s compliant with her ship regs. It’s her problem. And her captain’s.
A stationer male will be identified as the father, since all dna is registered, and yep, he’ll be hit for support, right along with mama.
So—say mama has not been careful, and has only one station-share. If papa has 2 shares or more, custody will automatically go to papa, if papa wishes it. And so will one of his shares when said child grows up, whether or not he wishes it. If each has only one, they will share custody, and the child, when adult, will have to earn his share through extra work, which the station will assign him. You are required to work half a day, in Pell’s economy, or pay the equivalent in credits—(if say you are working fulltime as an md). That guarantees your basics. A person trying to earn his share will have to work a second half-day until he can earn his share, which is rated as a commodity which fluctuates in value according to the economy…but he can ‘lock in’ a value at the start of his job, and he will work toward that goal. If he has taken advantage of his education, he will earn it sooner, earning on the level of, say, a technical worker watching the readouts and running the hydroponics system, rather than washing filters in the same.
How many merchant ships are there plying the space lanes? Are we talking hundreds? Thousands? From everything I’ve seen, I felt like there was a few hundred, but not more than that. It just didn’t seem like the few number of stations would support more than that to move the freight and other goods.
Interesting question! Gut feeling is low hundreds. There are so many variables: How much time do ships spend in dock? How many docks are available? When stations expand, they don’t increase their diameter, so the number of docks is pretty much locked in at the time of building. The older the station, the fewer the docks since they were designed for the sub-lighters. In fact I seem to recall that Thule had only one capable of taking a starship. Pell was probably the first station built to handle ftl ships.
The Company Wars boardgame lists 41 merchanters, including, interestingly, both Dublin and Dublin Again. There’s a lot more Reillys out there than we thought!
I’m not sure — you’ve got a lot of stars and a lot of stations, both Union and Alliance. I can easily imagine some insystem family ships that do little more than deal with deliveries between mining and manufacturing concerns within a single star’s sytem; then you have the short haulers that might deal with a loop of 2-3 sytems, then the long haulers who run a much larger loop. And Union is huge and easily expandable. Think about how many ships showed up with Elen Quen in deep space in Downbelow Station. I would think this is one thing that could have jumped by leaps and bounds, particularly with Union happily setting up Family ships for political expedience. Not everyone would be anywhere near a station at any one point in time. There could easily be thousands of ships.
Except that those ships have to eat. And, as far as I can tell, Jump would really mess with food production if you move beyond single-cell organisms. So it appears that one of the things that the stations supply is food. And that puts a limit on the population that can be supported.
There are huge, huge fish-farms in orbit, little more than floating cylinders using sunlight for algae and algae-eating fish—fishcakes and algae. Yum. Not to mention the yeast-farms. These are things that grow exponentially. When you think of Pell Station, itself huge, remember Pell’s shipyard, which is one more station, a little more industrial and rough; and the outlying station. Plus the fish and yeast farms. And mining off the insystem debris…which includes ice, for water. Everything is intensely recycled. But when you sell food to a ship, a little biomass leaves your system, and another ship will bring in biomass, so it’s an immensely complicated system of waste-treatment and reuse. Ships do have some onboard hydroponics for luxury goods. But Pell has trees. Their garden is a bit of a power-statement, but they do impress visitors.
CJ, one of things that consistently amazes me is the depth of your world-building. We come up with these off-the-wall questions and suppositions, and you have so clearly Been There well ahead of us asking–at least, I simply can’t accept the idea of you pondering much before answering. But the richness (quality) of your answers here sometimes makes me wish for some more ‘backstory’ in the books. F’rinstance, several months back we were ‘talking’ about station construction, a topic near & dear to this space nut mechanical engineer’s heart. You commented about a coffee vending machine in Hellburner in which the cup landed on its side 1 or 2 times out of 3. Quck hands were needed to save the coffee. You mentioned in the Blog, en passant, that the reason is because the machine had been moved from another level of the station, but never recalibrated for the different G level. That sort of lovely detail makes the story REAL, it feels right, but all that was printed in the book was that the cups often didn’t land upright. I know, something’s gotta give or we drown in detail with the story still untold, but how do you determine what goes and what stays, and how do you keep track of it all? (and I remain admiringly boggled that you nailed down the ‘why’ of such a trivial detail) Coffee machines on plain old Terra mis-spot the cup often enough, it seems to me that the reader would have accepted that without question (I sure did)–but the why, in this case, makes the story Even Better. And I never would have known unless I read the Blog.
I guess it is a Good Thing that you will start to capture some of this richness for us to enjoy again!
Ah, thank you. I do think these things out—in Cyteen I built a rotating linked set of wheels (clock) so I could handle precession in doing the times on station and on the ground; and, no, you can’t quite fit it in without disarranging the story, but it feels better if things fit. I try so hard to get things ‘right…’ and detailed….
Then a copyeditor gets in and decides Bren’s boat should be Jeishan instead of Jaishan, probably because there is a Jeishan somewhere once—and they’ll take that once, if it was first, and correct 4000 subsequent uses of the word in text, when I assure you, the 4000 uses should be somewhat suspected as the standard.
Oh, and then there was the c/e who decided on one of the Chanur books that she didn’t understand the space sequences, so she just removed them as ‘nonsensical’. Fortunately we caught that one. Firing while at dock is soooo untidy.
Could well be. Maybe that’s why Roddenberry invented the speak-to-the-box–and-voila! Fillet mignon and cherries jubilee for dessert. I read all these books at least 5 times, may even more, but oh geez, it’s been ages! I’ve been thinking it’s about time for sitting down and and re-reading every single book. Lots of fun and so much like visiting old and dear friends. Might help the memory and might spark some new thoughts.
I wasn’t counting insystemers, just starships.
Food is always going to be an issue – that’s why Downbelow is so important – it provides an alternative to Earth for biomass, but it’s still going to be awfully costly to boost that grain and rice into orbit.
They seem to use a lot of yeast-based stuff, and we know the stations have fish farms, and maybe chickens and rabbits. Hydroponics of course, and I seem to recall someone growing food plants in a spare cabin, but that’s probably more of a hobby than a realistic food source.
Corinthian seems to eat rather well with actual cooking happening, but I suspect that’s the exception.
Of course from the crew’s point of view, they don’t actually spend that much time in a fit state to eat anything, and I’d suppose that most of the eating takes place on station with just sandwiches and snacks when in transit.
There’s one other food source most of us wouldn’t favor: lab-grown muscle tissue. Steak in a vat. No cow. Just the tissue. Again, yum.
My now that’s something I don’t think has been mentioned [at least I don’t remember such], other than Chanur and that doesn’t count since they get homeworld critters. You could have a wide range of meats that way, pork, cow and chicken. Although I always did wonder how much veggies and fruit there might be available outside of world-based production. Could you do apples and strawberries, asparagus and zucchini [not to mention herbs and spices] in hydroponics in orbiting farms? Could you do the easier stuff like tomatoes on a larger ship? Didn’t one ship have on-board hydroponics with fish tanks?
Cultured tissue? I wouldn’t mind, especially if it was cheap fillet steak! And it saves killing a cow.
Herbs shouldn’t be a problem, and some spices (although I reckon a lot of those could be synthesized ).
Strawberries and tomatoes, yes. Asparagus needs deep soil I think, so maybe not. Don’t squashes need a lot of fertiliser? But then, they have to recycle an awful lot of c**p, so that shouldn’t be a problem. I’m not sure about apple trees, but dwarf espalliers might work. I suppose it comes down to economics. Resources in vs volume out.
Come to think of it, wasn’t the aboretum restaurant on Pell serving a reasonably priced salad?
I think they did, but I rather discounted them since they have a planet to utilize. Squash set me back a minute — it grows like mad in the small garden at work, but then there’s about 6 inches of horse manure on top of what passes for dirt around here [either clay or decomposed granite which is little more than individual grains of granite], so maybe that’s not a good example. But the Native Americans who grew squash prehistorically around the Southwest probably didn’t use fertilizers. One thing for sure, spacers would be masters at recycling, so breaking poop down to useable components would probably happen. Hey! Maybe that would be something they’d sell back to the stations? (ew), but just what do all those gantry lines involve, anyway?
The problem I see with growing plants on a space ship is the effects of Jump. The way it messes with time, it seems like you would miss those vital fertilization and harvest periods. Go into Jump with a crop of tomatoes 2 weeks from being ripe, and you could come out of it with tomatoes a week over-ripe. And, since I assume you don’t want bees buzzing around everywhere, you are down to hand fertilizing the plants. Of course, that’s good work for little kids, so maybe that’s not an issue.
CJ: “Firing while at dock is soooo untidy.”
Bound to cause talk and irritate the natives!
Growers time crops to flower and mature to hit markets at specific times. I think i would be possible to control flowering and pollination with light, temperature and fertilizer, which would control maturation of fruit. Fresh produce when coming out of jump could be *very* beneficial.
Another thought: HYDROPONICS!! The gardens would be computerized thus solving the problem of attention during jump; a nutrient bath would weigh a lot less than soil and growing cycles would be controlled. As for fertilization there is wind, again computer controlled, and perhaps stingless insects, with a specific life span, developed for fertilization purposes.
Need to think further on this. ;-D
I remember one book that a copy editor got hold off that converted the twin heros into a single person by the end. That was confusing.