Randomiser wrote:Can someone remind me what the Winton Mods consist of and how and why they came to have them?
Some of the biological discussion, while interesting in the abstract is just that, abstract. We are not discussing some random mods operating in an unknown and precarious environment. We are discussing carefully designed mods operating in a high-tech, advanced healthcare, reasonably civilised society with enough food for everyone. So no starvation, no 'buck teeth', no somatic overload that causes early death. The only problems in breeding might be prejudice, but Honor's large extended family, at least before Oyster Bay, suggests that hasn't been much of a problem for quite some time.
The Winton mods are fairly minor, in a lot of ways, compared to, say, Honor's Meyerdahl mods.
The Meyerdahl mods are actually fairly extreme where things like physical strength and toughness are concerned. The truth is that you've never really seen an example of Honor's brute strength, because her martial arts training usually precludes her needing to do all that grunting, heavy-duty, sweating stuff when it comes to hand-to-hand and she hasn't been schlepping any missiles from the magazine to the launcher the way Harkness was doing in OBS. Trust me, it's . . . impressive. (I did think about pointing out just how much upper-body strength, in particular, she demonstrated when I wrote the scene in which she snatches Andrew LaFollet's dead weight up off the deck,
tosses him over her shoulder, and
sprints for the lift with pulser darts whining and skipping all around her. But even though I know some of you will find this difficult to believe, I decided that wasn't the point to interrupt the action to drop an infodump on you!
)
On the other hand, although I can't remember exactly where it happens, at some point in one of the books Hamish comments that if they run into a mugger (or something like that) he'll hold her jacket and feed her bonbons while she deals with it, and it isn't entirely a joke. He's not even in her class at that sort of combat, and the bonbons were an oblique reference to her metabolism. (There are quite a few of those buried in the books, actually.) The truth is that Honor could arm wrestle Thandi and probably win at least two out of three times despite the fact that her apparent muscle mass is much less than Thandi's. Her reaction speed is also better than Thandi's, and her bones and internal organs are stronger and tougher (respectively), as well. On the other hand, Thandi doesn't have the ravenous sort of metabolic requirement Honor does.
The Winton mods actually predate the colonists' departure for Manticore by one generation, which makes them a fairly early package. They included adjustments to increase intelligence, longevity, immune system function, and a couple of associated elements. It is probable (
) that the famous "Winton Temper" owes something to the intelligence mods, since (as Allison explains to Honor at one point) the geneticists have discovered that modding for extra smarts often has secondary effects. (Those secondary effects are one reason the Bardasano line was almost culled by the Alignment. In that case, the secondary consequences tended to be pretty . . . extreme.) The basic Meyerdahl mods don't include an intelligence adjustment, but Honor and her dad are descended from the relatively small group who received the Meyerdahl
Beta package, which does. And Honor is darned sure in her own mind, after discussing it with Allison, that
her temper is a direct result of that part of her own modifications.
The original reason for the Winton mods (it was the original Roger Winton's parents who ordered the package for their children, and there's still a branch of the family on Old Earth) was to correct/delete a family tendency towards both diabetes and pancreatitis. They simply decided that while they were paying the hefty price tag associated with fixing those, they might as well go for a few other benefits, as well. This is rather different from the original reasons for the Meyerdahl mods, which were designed to suit human beings to an environment in which they had never evolved. As such, the Winton mods have no readily apparent "external" differentiation like Honor's strength or her metabolism. Also, unlike the Meyerdahl package, the Winton mods aren't "locked," although they have a very pronounced tendency to "breed true" or re-emerge after missing a generation.
They are also distributed fairly broadly through the population of the planet Manticore, considering that they arrived in-system solely with the Winton family, because of the constitutional requirement for the heir to the throne to marry a commoner. They have nowhere near the penetration of the population as the Meyerdahl (and similar heavy-grav) mods have on Sphinx, but a surprisingly high percentage of Manticorans are directly related to the Wintons after all these years!
At any rate, remember that the original colonists left Old Earth well before the Final War, which occurred while they were in transit. That means the SKM never had the same degree of anti-genie prejudice other star nations had (I think Stephanie actually reflects on this in ABF), and that was yet another reason Manticore's always been such a strong supporter of the Cherwell Convention.