Uncompromising Honor, Snippet #5

quite possibly a cat wrote:

runsforcelery wrote:Hillary Indrakashi Enkateshwara Tower
City of Old Chicago
Sol System
Solarian League

This is what you get if you remove the bold and size. So its "Hillary Indrakashi Enkateshwara Tower". Tada!

Yeah - I thought that was likely, but just wanted to make sure that I had not missed a minor character named Hillary!

isaac_newton wrote:

quite possibly a cat wrote:Hillary Indrakashi Enkateshwara Tower
City of Old Chicago
Sol System
Solarian League

This is what you get if you remove the bold and size. So its "Hillary Indrakashi Enkateshwara Tower". Tada!

Yeah - I thought that was likely, but just wanted to make sure that I had not missed a minor character named Hillary![/quote]

More interesting to talk about meaning versus name of a building that means nothing.

runsforcelery wrote:Hillary Indrakashi Enkateshwara Tower
City of Old Chicago
Sol System
Solarian League

“Either there are an awful lot of these moles, or our search algorithms need some serious tweaking.”

You are a vicious, evil, man

runsforcelery wrote: “Oh, yes?” Honor gave Misty a conspiratorial smile. “Well, if you think three o’clock feedings are bad for most children, you should think about trying to keep somebody with the Meyerdahl mods fed! My mom’s made a few . . . pithy comments on that task over the years. They include references to somebody named Sisyphus.”

Is it me, or has the "genie" thing suddenly gotten much more acceptable since Honor was a kid, after millennia of not. I wonder if that fits in with the Alignments strategy to make genetic mods common, or standard. Maybe calling the Beowulf standard a double standard.

Dca wrote:Is it me, or has the "genie" thing suddenly gotten much more acceptable since Honor was a kid, after millennia of not. I wonder if that fits in with the Alignments strategy to make genetic mods common, or standard. Maybe calling the Beowulf standard a double standard.

It wasn't millennia; it was centuries. It hasn't been multiple millennia from the end of the Final War to the 'present day' in the Honorverse; I don't think it's been even one millennium.

[quote="Dca"]Is it me, or has the "genie" thing suddenly gotten much more acceptable since Honor was a kid, after millennia of not. I wonder if that fits in with the Alignments strategy to make genetic mods common, or standard. Maybe calling the Beowulf standard a double standard. /snip/

Like it was said elsewhere, if the alignment spent 10% of their effort on education rather than bloody conquest..they would have won already

Dca wrote:

runsforcelery wrote: “Oh, yes?” Honor gave Misty a conspiratorial smile. “Well, if you think three o’clock feedings are bad for most children, you should think about trying to keep somebody with the Meyerdahl mods fed! My mom’s made a few . . . pithy comments on that task over the years. They include references to somebody named Sisyphus.”

Is it me, or has the "genie" thing suddenly gotten much more acceptable since Honor was a kid, after millennia of not. I wonder if that fits in with the Alignments strategy to make genetic mods common, or standard. Maybe calling the Beowulf standard a double standard.

There are different levels of genetic modification.

Purely cosmetic mods have always been acceptable under the Beowulf Code. So have mods to correct disease states or to "tweak" colonists for their environments. And a lot of the inherited mods you see --- especially on Beowulf or in Manticore or Haven --- are the result of genetic slave ancestors.

What the Beowulf Code forbade was a deliberate program of genetic improvement of what you might call entire groups of people --- the designed genetic uplift of the species as a whole, as it were --- moving beyond the inherent possibilities of the DNA being worked with. The restrictions were very tight for a century or two after the Final War. In fact, there were specific prohibitory laws on the books in the vast majority of star systems. Those have been gradually reduced as the Final War recedes into racial memory, and Beowulf has been just fine with that. In fact, Beowulf was never unalterably opposed to genetic modification to the same extent as many of the systems which enacted those laws. Unfortunately, after the Final War, it was difficult to take a nuanced approach to the issue . . . or to convince others that you'd already taken that sort of approach, for that matter.

What I'm saying is that the implementation of the Beopwulf Code's principles was draconian and . . . overly harsh in comparison to what Beowulf had actually set forth. And the Beowulf Code itself never had the force of law. It is a code of ethics and moral and professional responsibilities, and geneticists who violate its tenets can be severely sanctioned by professional organizations or even held criminally responsible in court when the breach the Code and it ends badly, but it was never a law code. Rather it was a professional bio-ethics code which was given the force of law by frightened system governments all over inhabited space. Portions of it still have --- and will have --- the force of law because of statutes enacted in its wake, of course. Weaponized biotech, for example, has been universally outlawed (which doesn't mean some rogue regimes don't experiment with it, anyway) and so have some forms of human experimentation, etc. But those are laws passed by governments influenced by the Code, not efforts to give the Code itself the force of law.

The fear of genetically modified/enhanced humans has substantially ebbed since those laws were passed, and many of them have been repealed or simply allowed to lapse. And ifthe Alignment wasn't so hellbent on imposing it vision for humanity, most of what they say they want to accomplish could be accomplished openly in the current climate throughout most of the League.


The biggest thing to remember here in reference to your point about "genies" becoming more acceptable, though, is that the last time you really saw a reference to a general prejudice against all "genies" was in Stephanie Harrington's day. The prejudice which exists "today" (1922-23 PD) is directed primarily at genetic slaves (and is about as divorced from anything smacking of rationality as racial prejudice usually is).

runsforcelery wrote:What the Beowulf Code forbade was a deliberate program of genetic improvement of what you might call entire groups of people --- the designed genetic uplift of the species as a whole, as it were --- moving beyond the inherent possibilities of the DNA being worked with. The restrictions were very tight for a century or two after the Final War. In fact, there were specific prohibitory laws on the books in the vast majority of star systems. Those have been gradually reduced as the Final War recedes into racial memory, and Beowulf has been just fine with that. In fact, Beowulf was never unalterably opposed to genetic modification to the same extent as many of the systems which enacted those laws. Unfortunately, after the Final War, it was difficult to take a nuanced approach to the issue . . . or to convince others that you'd already taken that sort of approach, for that matter.

"the designed genetic uplift of the species as a whole"

Replace that with nuclear powerplants, and you see we have a very similar situation today.

MaxxQ wrote:"the designed genetic uplift of the species as a whole"

Replace that with nuclear powerplants, and you see we have a very similar situation today.

That is largely due to kgb/gru funding and active measures. Seriously, I’m not making that up.

runsforcelery wrote:

runsforcelery wrote: “Oh, yes?” Honor gave Misty a conspiratorial smile. “Well, if you think three o’clock feedings are bad for most children, you should think about trying to keep somebody with the Meyerdahl mods fed! My mom’s made a few . . . pithy comments on that task over the years. They include references to somebody named Sisyphus.”

Is it me, or has the "genie" thing suddenly gotten much more acceptable since Honor was a kid, after millennia of not. I wonder if that fits in with the Alignments strategy to make genetic mods common, or standard. Maybe calling the Beowulf standard a double standard.

There are different levels of genetic modification.

Purely cosmetic mods have always been acceptable under the Beowulf Code. So have mods to correct disease states or to "tweak" colonists for their environments. And a lot of the inherited mods you see --- especially on Beowulf or in Manticore or Haven --- are the result of genetic slave ancestors.

What the Beowulf Code forbade was a deliberate program of genetic improvement of what you might call entire groups of people --- the designed genetic uplift of the species as a whole, as it were --- moving beyond the inherent possibilities of the DNA being worked with. The restrictions were very tight for a century or two after the Final War. In fact, there were specific prohibitory laws on the books in the vast majority of star systems. Those have been gradually reduced as the Final War recedes into racial memory, and Beowulf has been just fine with that. In fact, Beowulf was never unalterably opposed to genetic modification to the same extent as many of the systems which enacted those laws. Unfortunately, after the Final War, it was difficult to take a nuanced approach to the issue . . . or to convince others that you'd already taken that sort of approach, for that matter.

What I'm saying is that the implementation of the Beopwulf Code's principles was draconian and . . . overly harsh in comparison to what Beowulf had actually set forth. And the Beowulf Code itself never had the force of law. It is a code of ethics and moral and professional responsibilities, and geneticists who violate its tenets can be severely sanctioned by professional organizations or even held criminally responsible in court when the breach the Code and it ends badly, but it was never a law code. Rather it was a professional bio-ethics code which was given the force of law by frightened system governments all over inhabited space. Portions of it still have --- and will have --- the force of law because of statutes enacted in its wake, of course. Weaponized biotech, for example, has been universally outlawed (which doesn't mean some rogue regimes don't experiment with it, anyway) and so have some forms of human experimentation, etc. But those are laws passed by governments influenced by the Code, not efforts to give the Code itself the force of law.

The fear of genetically modified/enhanced humans has substantially ebbed since those laws were passed, and many of them have been repealed or simply allowed to lapse. And ifthe Alignment wasn't so hellbent on imposing it vision for humanity, most of what they say they want to accomplish could be accomplished openly in the current climate throughout most of the League.


The biggest thing to remember here in reference to your point about "genies" becoming more acceptable, though, is that the last time you really saw a reference to a general prejudice against all "genies" was in Stephanie Harrington's day. The prejudice which exists "today" (1922-23 PD) is directed primarily at genetic slaves (and is about as divorced from anything smacking of rationality as racial prejudice usually is).[/quote]

I find the fact that Honor's mods are not more widespread. It sounds like they were done for people on Sphynx. We've had a lot of those in the book. A lot of them join the navy. Yet Honor seems unique in terms of her ability to eat.

Shouldn't others born on the planet have the same mods and thus the same issues? Why is everyone else so surprised?