Month: October 2011
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Sharers uses plants and animals only as they are used in return. So, because Sharers consume plants and animals as food, they accept that they in turn will become food for other life forms; that predators will ultimately consume them. A unique expression of the Sharer worldview is their language, in which subject and object…
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Last week we had a post on how the Iroquois used to kidnap colonists to join their tribe. That time is long gone–but today, in the USA, our own state governments kidnap native American children. The children, supposedly from bad situations, are sent to foster care with strangers instead of their own family members. But…
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As Max pointed out (no doubt with help from tabby friends), “Adapting ourselves would be expensive enough, but there’s no way we could afford to adapt all the species that would be wiped out by catastrophic climate change.” Humans depend on all kinds of organisms out there that we don’t even know about. For instance,…
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To live on a planet with no dry land, the Sharers “lifeshaped” their own genes. Webbed fingers and toes, and symbiotic “breathmicrobes” adapted them to a water world. Should we do the same? Our own coasts will be flooding soon; maybe Floridians could use webbed feet. Our own Earth is inexorably becoming “alien,” an overheated…
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On the planet Shora, there are living rafts like trees that float, their root/branches extending through the water. These rafts grow for many years, building up soil that supports floating wildlife, like Noah’s ark. The Sharers tunnel into the huge “trunks” of the raft, and hide their genetic engineering cultures there. Amazingly, real floating meadows…
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In A Door into Ocean, there are no vertebrates; no creatures with a “backbone.” But invertebrates like cephalopods have evolved to fill every niche–even flying squid. And who needs a backbone (don’t miss this octopus climbing through the hole!) Most science-fictional ecosystems show only one creature of a type, like the giant sandworm. But on…
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This year is the 25th since publication of A Door into Ocean. Written during Reagan/Thatcher, with “the bomb” ten minutes away, A Door into Ocean asks: How can we defend our freedom yet remain human? A Door into Ocean won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, ahead of runners-up James Morrow’s This is How the…
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For a change of pace–some real experiments. What happens to microbes in space? I’ve reviewed NASA grants for bugs in micrograv, and lots of interesting things come out. Some bacteria grow faster in micrograv; and some pathogens get more virulent. Bacteria more readily form biofilms (such as these grown by my student). And antibiotic resistance…
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In Octavia Butler’s Dawn (Lilith’s Brood), an advanced star-faring species engineers itself to such “perfection” that it must kidnap other beings (including humans) to obtain their “imperfect” genes. Would humans ever do such a thing? Before colonization, the native American population (who actually traveled the farthest from Africa) were the least diverse genetically, the most…
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What if space-faring humans could evolve as a quasispecies? Could this be one way to adapt to a new planet? A quasispecies is a population of RNA viruses such as HIV (AIDS) or Hepatitis C. RNA genomes have high mutation rates; as high as 10% per base, for HIV. So the vast majority of progeny…
Joan Slonczewski 