[Crucial]

Is this the whole thread? It’s interesting so far but lacks a main idea and a conclusion.

[NewJerseyJoe]

P4L

[Rurudyne]

I’ve an unpublished novel that involves a race of beings which approached a crisis a long time in their past. The crisis (related at one point in the story) was this: in trying to improve themselves they had created the situation whereby those responsible for the enhancements were saying that they owned the subsistence of physical life even if they didn’t own the individual lives themselves. Thus those owning the subsistence thought they should have some say about the disposition of their property.

A critical aspect of this tale, though, is that it really is about Law. The genetic masterminds were advancing what we would call administrative law, which basically holds all things are political in nature, and they were successfully RESISTED by those using what we might term a common law, or a Law of “innate things”.

The resolution made in the story was to abandon the “Administrative Way” entirely for that race and those deemed their children ... but for outsiders they retained the Administrative Way.

Here, though, is a sticking point: under their Law to genetically engineer a sentient being made it to be considered a child of the race ... so no mad scientists (though really the race was overrun with them) could create a living slave race as the act of modifying or creating meant that they could no longer be considered potential slaves.

[Billthedrill]

Owens' case is that science fact is moving faster than science fiction can keep up with, a complaint quite a few of us who try that genre have been making for some years now. In this particular case, genome "hacking". There's nothing new about altering an organism's genome, viruses do it all the time. To achieve a stated outcome, however, that's quite a different thing. Fascinating field, but we're a long way yet from designer genes. But not that long. If you're going to write a novel about it, better expect it to have a short shelf life.

There is a wonderfully creepy scene in William Gibson's iconic and astonishingly predictive Neuromancer where the AI attempting to force contact with the protagonist finds him in an airport and rings each pay phone successively as the protagonist walks by. Pay phone. Younger FReepers may have to look that up. And that was published in 1984.