Larry Niven, Sexist?
Voyl
sexist?
Most good modern sci-fi writers employ strong female protagonists. Not Niven.
Although I haven't read everything Niven's published, the human female
characters of his that I have encountered all seem to be nothing more than
romance interests for the protagonists or something equally lame.
Niven's heroes are cunning, resourceful, and almost always male. The women are
the ones who make mistakes, need things explained to them, and they never seem
to do any of the clever stuff we all like about Niven characters.
Flipping through _N-Space_ I can find only a couple of women who aren't
portrayed as naturally subservient or ditsy. In one story aliens give humans
knowledge pills; the man learns to be a starship captain while the woman learns
to be a better housewife, naturally. In another story, an ignorant woman
tourist almost wrecks an entire colony while in still another story the male
protagonist must keep his woman calm after he figures out that the sun has gone
nova.
And _Ringworld_, come on! We have a resourceful human male protagonist, a male
Kzin warrior, etc, and then the woman (an airhead, of course) is there as a
goddamned luck charm! She is utterly passive, a mere conduit of some greater
power.
Is he really a misogynist or does he simply lack the ability to write female
characters? Any thoughts?
Dorothy J Heydt
Voyl <vo...@aol.com> wrote:
>Is it just me, or does Larry Niven's writing seem a more than just a bit
>sexist?
>
>Most good modern sci-fi writers employ strong female protagonists. Not Niven.
The thing I noted long ago about Niven's work is how many of his
alien races have sentient males and non-sentient females. (For loose
definitions of "male" and "female".) It's as though some part of
his mind were being wistful about oh, if only human females were
non-sentient too, how much simpler life would be.
Mind you, it probably *wouldn't*, but that's another story.
Probably _Ethan of Athos._
Dorothy J. Heydt
Albany, California
djh...@kithrup.com
http://www.kithrup.com/~djheydt
Cambias
(Voyl) wrote:
> Is it just me, or does Larry Niven's writing seem a more than just a bit
> sexist?
>
> Most good modern sci-fi writers employ strong female protagonists. Not Niven.
>
snip
>
> Is he really a misogynist or does he simply lack the ability to write female
> characters? Any thoughts?
Well, let's give him the benefit of the doubt. I think he tries to play
to his strengths, and female characters are not among them, so he doesn't
use them much. Although in some of his more recent work he has tried it,
with mixed results: the Smoke Ring books certainly had active and
important female characters, though _none_ of the characters in those
books could be called strong or interesting (which was the big problem
with them). And didn't he collaborate with Barnes on a story about women
athletes?
"Misogynist" is one of those words like "Fascist" which gets tossed around
so casually as to be meaningless. About the only sense it conveys
nowadays is "man with whom the speaker disagrees on some subject related
to gender." The man is married, apparently quite happily, for something
like thirty years now to the same woman. Speculating about the inside of
his skull is unwise.
Cambias
James Nicoll
>>Is it just me, or does Larry Niven's writing seem a more than just a bit
>>sexist?
>>
>>Most good modern sci-fi writers employ strong female protagonists. Not Niven.
>
>alien races have sentient males and non-sentient females. (For loose
>definitions of "male" and "female".) It's as though some part of
>his mind were being wistful about oh, if only human females were
>non-sentient too, how much simpler life would be.
>
idiot males, ims.
James Nicoll
--
Dwight Thieme
: In article <FMGpL...@kithrup.com>,
As another poster noted, Niven seems to be aware of his weaknesses
and writes around them. For a counter-example, think of - what's
her name - Brenda Lee? Niven noted that he liked the character and
would someday do more with her.
Ike
Dorothy J Heydt
James Nicoll <jam...@nyquist.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
>>
>>The thing I noted long ago about Niven's work is how many of his
>>alien races have sentient males and non-sentient females. (For loose
>>definitions of "male" and "female".) It's as though some part of
>>his mind were being wistful about oh, if only human females were
>>non-sentient too, how much simpler life would be.
>>
> One exception that comes to mind are the Grogs: smart females,
>idiot males, ims.
Well, now, the Grogs are a slightly different case. Immature,
non-sentient males and females that are mobile and neotenic in
that they breed in this immature form. Then the males die and
the females grow up to be sessile, sentient Grogs. Now, compare
Niven's Protectors, in which the immature neotenic breeder forms
that are humans, under the right stimulus, grow up to be sexless
hyperintelligent Protectors.
It's as though he were saying "Females can't be sentient until
they aren't females any more, and come to think of it, that works
with males too."
Again, cf. Bujold's _Ethan of Athos,_ with its male-only population
founded by a bunch of idealists who apparently thought, "Men make
fools of themselves over women. If only men could live in a
world without women, they would be chaste, sensible, and rational."
So they founded Athos and, let us hope, did not live long enough
to discover that people make fools of themselves over people,
biological and social gender more or less notwithstanding.
Louann Miller
>: >>Is it just me, or does Larry Niven's writing seem a more than just a bit
>: >>sexist?
>: >The thing I noted long ago about Niven's work is how many of his
>: >alien races have sentient males and non-sentient females. (For loose
>: >definitions of "male" and "female".) It's as though some part of
>: >his mind were being wistful about oh, if only human females were
>: >non-sentient too, how much simpler life would be.
I had a much more favorable opinion of Niven before I met him in the
mid 1980's. Very rude.
Dwight Thieme
Funny, that's when I met him, and formed the same impression. It was
at a book signing though, so I figured that, given the nature of the
fans - bright boys all, at least half of whom wanted to point out
where he had made a mistake - he had a right to be peeved. Got an
autographed copy of 'Protector' too. Were you by any chance in
the same circumstances?
Ike
Richard Harter
wrote:
>
>>: Dorothy J Heydt <djh...@kithrup.com> wrote:
>>: >Voyl <vo...@aol.com> wrote:
>
>>: >>Is it just me, or does Larry Niven's writing seem a more than just a bit
>>: >>sexist?
>
>>: >The thing I noted long ago about Niven's work is how many of his
>>: >alien races have sentient males and non-sentient females. (For loose
>>: >definitions of "male" and "female".) It's as though some part of
>>: >his mind were being wistful about oh, if only human females were
>>: >non-sentient too, how much simpler life would be.
>
>I had a much more favorable opinion of Niven before I met him in the
>mid 1980's. Very rude.
That's odd. I've never known him to be significantly rude -
inconsiderate upon occasion, perhaps - but not rude. Bruce Pelz is
rude; prides himself on it. Jerry Pournelle is rude much as skunks
smell bad; it's in his nature - he can't help it. But Larry???
>
Richard Harter, c...@tiac.net
http://www.tiac.net/users/cri
I have been waging relentless war on reality;
So far reality is ahead, 0 to -1.
Louann Miller
Thieme) wrote:
>Louann Miller (loua...@yahoo.net) wrote:
>: I had a much more favorable opinion of Niven before I met him in the
>: mid 1980's. Very rude.
>
>Funny, that's when I met him, and formed the same impression. It was
>at a book signing though, so I figured that, given the nature of the
>fans - bright boys all, at least half of whom wanted to point out
>where he had made a mistake - he had a right to be peeved. Got an
>autographed copy of 'Protector' too. Were you by any chance in
>the same circumstances?
In a broad sense, except I didn't get the autograph.
Dwight Thieme
: On 9 Dec 1999 17:41:47 GMT, c36...@cclabs.missouri.edu (Dwight
: Thieme) wrote:
: >Louann Miller (loua...@yahoo.net) wrote:
Oh, I forgot to mention - most of the books fans brought to
be autographed were from his 'known Space' cycle, *not* the
schlock (Smoke Ring II?) he was plugging.
Ike
Dorothy J Heydt
Louann Miller <loua...@yahoo.net> wrote:
>
>I had a much more favorable opinion of Niven before I met him in the
>mid 1980's. Very rude.
He can be charming when he wants to be. Remember that he grew up
with inherited money and was trained to be a gentleman. This, of
course, means that when he *wants* to be rude he's better at it
than any of the rest of us could manage. Remember Lord Peter's
line?
"'I thank the goodness and the grace
That on my birth have smiled,'
said Lord Peter, 'and taught me to be bestially impertinent when
I choose.'"
(_Whose Body?_ chapter III.)
Del Cotter
James Nicoll <jam...@nyquist.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
>Dorothy J Heydt <djh...@kithrup.com> wrote:
>
>>The thing I noted long ago about Niven's work is how many of his
>>alien races have sentient males and non-sentient females. (For loose
>>definitions of "male" and "female".) It's as though some part of
>>his mind were being wistful about oh, if only human females were
>>non-sentient too, how much simpler life would be.
>>
> One exception that comes to mind are the Grogs: smart females,
>idiot males, ims.
The Puppeteers, of course, have two fully-sentient sexes. Humans and
other species have to be told as a matter of courtesy which sex a
particular puppeteer is, because they can't tell, and puppeteers don't
seem to find it a big deal. This is hardly surprising, since they are
egg-layers, so there is no particular reason for one sex to be stuck at
home pregnant.
The Kzinti are the famous example, although even they started out with
two sentient sexes: the males messed with genetic engineering to impose
an unnatural sex-linked limit on intelligence.
So, that's one dumb-male species, one dumb-female species, and one
equally-smart species. It looks to me as if Niven was playing with
various possibilities. What a sexist pig, eh?
Dorothy can doubtless cite two more smart-male dumb-female species from
Larry Niven's work. Known Space would be best, but any of his stories
will do.
--
Del Cotter d...@branta.demon.co.uk
"Choose the Dark Side... now why would I do a thing like that?"
--Obi-Wan Renton
Mike Schilling
> In article <b5eDjUAI...@branta.demon.co.uk>,
> Del Cotter <d...@branta.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> >
> >The Puppeteers, of course, have two fully-sentient sexes....
>
> Two sentient sexes, which we may call "Male-1" and "Male-2" (or
> whatever you like) and one non=sentient sex, the females.
> >
> >The Kzinti are the famous example, although even they started out with
> >two sentient sexes: the males messed with genetic engineering to impose
> >an unnatural sex-linked limit on intelligence.
>
> Did they now. I didn't know about the Kzinti.
This is true only if you accept the Man-Kzin Wars series as canon.
Kristopher/EOS
It comes up in the _Ringworld_ books.
Kristopher/EOS
Dave Godwin
Good choice.
"Jerry Friedman" <jfried...@my-deja.com> wrote in message
news:82pibh$t45$1...@nnrp1.deja.com...
> In article <cambias-0912...@d7091.dialup.cornell.edu>,
> cam...@SPAHMTRAP.heliograph.com (Cambias) wrote:
> ...
> > And didn't he collaborate with Barnes on a story about women
> > athletes?
>
> _Achilles' Choice_. I keep seeing it in the library and not reading it.
> ...
>
> --
> Jerry Friedman
> jfrE...@nnm.cc.nm.us
> i before e
> and all the disclaimers
>
>
> Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
> Before you buy.
Jerry Friedman
Dorothy J Heydt
Del Cotter <d...@branta.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>
>The Puppeteers, of course, have two fully-sentient sexes....
Two sentient sexes, which we may call "Male-1" and "Male-2" (or
whatever you like) and one non=sentient sex, the females.
>
>The Kzinti are the famous example, although even they started out with
>two sentient sexes: the males messed with genetic engineering to impose
>an unnatural sex-linked limit on intelligence.
Did they now. I didn't know about the Kzinti.
>
>Dorothy can doubtless cite two more smart-male dumb-female species from
>Larry Niven's work. Known Space would be best, but any of his stories
>will do.
Well, I can think of the thrintun, who had dumb females and--
I won't say smart, but slightly less dumb males. I can't think
of any others, but then I quit reading Niven quite a while ago.
Brendan Macmillan
: In article <cambias-0912...@d7091.dialup.cornell.edu>,
: cam...@SPAHMTRAP.heliograph.com (Cambias) wrote:
:> And didn't he collaborate with Barnes on a story about women athletes?
: _Achilles' Choice_. I keep seeing it in the library and not reading it.
This book is best left unread.
But should you wish to succumb, all good second hand book-shops have multiple
copies to choose from.
--
Brendan Macmillan
br...@csse.monash.edu.au +61 (3) 9587 2117 tel: +61 (3) 9905 5194
Email is checked daily voice mail Phone is rarely attended
In an Austrian hotel catering to skiers: Not to perambulate the
corriders during the hours of repose in the boots of ascension.
Brendan Macmillan
: Niven's heroes are cunning, resourceful, and almost always male. The women are
: the ones who make mistakes, need things explained to them, and they never seem
: to do any of the clever stuff we all like about Niven characters.
male... perhaps cunning problem solving is easier to tell from the
protagonists point of view; and Niven is never writes from a female
character (I think). I'm not sure that that is sexist.
: In one story aliens give humans knowledge pills; the man learns to be a
: starship captain while the woman learns to be a better housewife,
: naturally.
A curious line in that story ("The Fourth Profession") - the aliens plan
to sell pills that make women "perfect" - from a male point of view. The
protagonist first sees this as "perfect housewife", but is corrected into
seeing it as a woman trying to get a man to marry her. The interesting
line is that the protagonist "thinks it through" and says that this is
a Bad Thing. But the *reasoning* of the protagonist is not given. Why not?
: In another story, an ignorant woman tourist almost wrecks an entire colony
Well, that *was* pretty ditsy. hmmmm... Could it be that it was because
she was an ignorant tourist, rather than an ignorant woman?
while in still another story the male protagonist must
: keep his woman calm after he figures out that the sun has gone nova.
That's "Inconstant Moon" - and I think you are being unfair to the woman -
she figures it out ahead of him, devises a test, and actually tests it.
The guy character was a popular-science writer, and so he *should* have a
head start in all this. Of course, she does guess wrong - but she
realises it ahead of the guy too.
Though true that, in the end, the guy does take charge of the crisis.
: And _Ringworld_, come on! We have a resourceful human male protagonist, a male
: Kzin warrior, etc, and then the woman (an airhead, of course) is there as a
: goddamned luck charm! She is utterly passive, a mere conduit of some greater
: power.
Yes, the "luck gene" of Teela Brown turns a person into a mere conduit. But
in order to write about this from a human point of view, the character's
got to be either male or female. Also, the girl *is* a girl - 20 years old,
compared to about 200 for the male. Perhaps this situation is more a
comment on age rather than gender difference?
: Is he really a misogynist or does he simply lack the ability to write female
: characters? Any thoughts?
I think the main thing is that his protagonists are male. And, well,
puzzle fiction is more easily told from the protagonists point of view.
(Oh. Sherlock Holmes is puzzle fiction. And Holmes is not the narrator...)
Mark A Mandel
: One exception that comes to mind are the Grogs: smart females,
: idiot males, ims.
That's the Chirpsithra. The Grogs are descended from thrintun (Slavers),
who indeed had non-sentient females.
-- Mark A. Mandel
--
If you're reading this in a newsgroup: to reply by mail,
remove the obvious spam-blocker from my edress.
Mark A Mandel
: In article <b5eDjUAI...@branta.demon.co.uk>,
: Del Cotter <d...@branta.demon.co.uk> wrote:
: >
: >The Puppeteers, of course, have two fully-sentient sexes....
: Two sentient sexes, which we may call "Male-1" and "Male-2" (or
: whatever you like) and one non=sentient sex, the females.
Two sentient sexes, one of which is sperm-bearing and one egg-bearing
(thus close to our concept of biologically male and female resp.), and
a nonsentient "sex" in whose body the eggs are incubated, which has an
entirely separate mode of reproduction: in fact, a different species
altogether. The Puppeteers proper lay their eggs in the flesh of the
"incubators". "No wonder the Puppeteers don't like to talk about it", our
hero thinks.
James Nicoll
Mark A Mandel <mam-DIE-S...@world.std.com> wrote:
>James Nicoll (jam...@nyquist.uwaterloo.ca) wrote:
>: One exception that comes to mind are the Grogs: smart females,
>: idiot males, ims.
>
>That's the Chirpsithra. The Grogs are descended from thrintun (Slavers),
>who indeed had non-sentient females.
>
the greatly changed descendents of the Slavers but, hell, it was a billion
and a half years and the wrong side of a Doomsday device since a Thrint
had progeny.
But I am looking at my copy of _Neutron Star_ and in _The
Handicapped_, grogs don't grow big brains until they go sessile and
only the females do that.
Lucky, lucky grogs that they never showed themselves to the Pak
who collected lifeforms for the Ringworld.
--
Richard Horton
>_Achilles' Choice_. I keep seeing it in the library and not reading it.
>...
Don't bother. Except it's really short so it wouldn't waste all that
much of your time.
--
Rich Horton | Stable Email: mailto://richard...@sff.net
Home Page: http://www.sff.net/people/richard.horton
Also visit SF Site (http://www.sfsite.com) and Tangent Online (http://www.sfsite.com/tangent)
Douglas Muir
> who collected lifeforms for the Ringworld.
Actually, Louis Wu assumes that they did. The Ringworld kzinti who left the
Map of Kzin to explore the Map of Down never returned; Wu says that they must
have met grogs. Which seems a reasonable assumption.
This would suggest that either
1) The Pak were immune to the Grog power, or
2) The Pak were bright first enough to figure out what the Grogs could do
from a safe distance away, and then to capture some grogs for transport.
Either way, the fact that the Pak didn't consider the grogs dangerous enough
to be worth exterminating suggests that their power really is as limited as
they say. Heck, it must be. Otherwise, they'd be running the whole Ringworld.
Doug M.
Kristopher/EOS
>
> James Nicoll (jam...@nyquist.uwaterloo.ca) wrote:
>
>:One exception that comes to mind are the Grogs: smart females,
>: idiot males, ims.
>
> That's the Chirpsithra. The Grogs are descended from thrintun
> (Slavers), who indeed had non-sentient females.
Sorry, no, that was only one fan's idea of how to destroy the
Known Space setting. There was never any mention in print
about the Grog being Thintun descendents, and Niven never says
that it's true in any of his articles.
Kristopher/EOS
Charles T. Biggs
Voyl wrote in message <19991209020428...@ng-fx1.aol.com>...
>
In another story, an ignorant woman
>tourist almost wrecks an entire colony
>
Is this the one that has a male character called Bronze Legs, a female
tourist that has some sort of implant that allows her to record all of her
thoughts and sensations for others to experience (and which wrecks havoc
with her sex life because she can't find a male willing to risk being
'remembered' on one of those tapes for all eternity) and a planet orbiting a
(double?) star that periodically puts out a white flare that causes some
forms of life on this world to go into hiding while other forms come out and
binge on whatever food they can find? I also recalled the native sentient
species of this planet having an interesting way of being sexed: if it had
six legs, she was still a virgin; four legs she had 'nested' once; two legs
she had 'nested' twice and was now an over-sexed male. Or is this a
different story with a similar premise?
Chris
Dorothy J Heydt
Kristopher/EOS <eosl...@net-link.net> wrote:
>
>Sorry, no, that was only one fan's idea of how to destroy the
>Known Space setting. There was never any mention in print
>about the Grog being Thintun descendents, and Niven never says
>that it's true in any of his articles.
Oh, it's *suggested* in whatever story that was when a human
first encountered a Grog. Human: "It's the Slaver power. Your
ancestors were Slavers." Grog: :We never heard of any Slavers,
so far as we know we've always been like this, living right
here.: (Approximately.)
But no story I have read, and as I said I quit reading Niven
several years back, says positively that they were or they
weren't.
Brendan Macmillan
: Voyl wrote in message <19991209020428...@ng-fx1.aol.com>...
:>
: In another story, an ignorant woman
:>tourist almost wrecks an entire colony
:>
"FLARE TIME"
: Is this the one that has a male character called Bronze Legs, a female
: tourist that has some sort of implant that allows her to record all of her
: thoughts and sensations for others to experience (and which wrecks havoc
: with her sex life because she can't find a male willing to risk being
: 'remembered' on one of those tapes for all eternity) and a planet orbiting a
: (double?) star that periodically puts out a white flare that causes some
: forms of life on this world to go into hiding while other forms come out and
: binge on whatever food they can find? I also recalled the native sentient
: species of this planet having an interesting way of being sexed: if it had
: six legs, she was still a virgin; four legs she had 'nested' once; two legs
: she had 'nested' twice and was now an over-sexed male. Or is this a
: different story with a similar premise?
: Chris
--
Niall McAuley
[lots of known space spoilers ho]
>Either way, the fact that the Pak didn't consider the grogs dangerous enough
>to be worth exterminating suggests that their power really is as limited as
>they say.
I gather you've read _The Ringworld Throne_ which I probably won't read.
The Pak who allegedly made Ringworld are apparently quite different
from the Brennan monster and his impressions of Phssthpok. Brennan
exterminated the Martians quite casually, and killed Phssthpok the
moment he thought he knew what was going on.
The engineers visited Earth, Mars and Kzin without hurting a fly. I don't
believe it for a second.
>Heck, it must be. Otherwise, they'd be running the whole Ringworld.
Now *there's* an idea. Why would anyone build a mad structure like
Ringworld? To keep the maximum amount of habitable space within
brain's reach of the ruling Grog. This may beat out my previous best
retcon for the nonsense presented in _Protector_.
--
Niall [real address ends in se, not es]
Mark A Mandel
from the Big Amplifier to our time (same as Known Space time on this
scale).
-- Mark A. Mandel
FIJAGH! Now, *filking*, on the other hand...
http://world.std.com/~mam/filk.html
On Thu, 9 Dec 1999, Sean Eric Fagan wrote:
#In article <FMIB0...@world.std.com> you write:
#>That's the Chirpsithra. The Grogs are descended from thrintun (Slavers),
#>who indeed had non-sentient females.
#
#Grog females are sentient, and males non-sentient.
#
#Sean.
#
Louann Miller
<br...@molly.csse.monash.edu.au> wrote:
>: Is he really a misogynist or does he simply lack the ability to write female
>: characters? Any thoughts?
>
>I think the main thing is that his protagonists are male. And, well,
>puzzle fiction is more easily told from the protagonists point of view.
>(Oh. Sherlock Holmes is puzzle fiction. And Holmes is not the narrator...)
Holmes is not puzzle fiction in the same sense that, say, Agatha
Christie is. The reader is not given a fair shot at reaching the
conclusions first. You see Holmes poring over a clue (word written in
blood on the wall) and get a general description of what he sees, but
not the crucial details (written at X height, small scratches in the
plaster) that let him make specific deductions (man of height Y if he
wrote at eye level, long fingernails) that would let the reader play
too.
Charles Fisher
>
> In article <b5eDjUAI...@branta.demon.co.uk>,
> Del Cotter <d...@branta.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> >
> >The Puppeteers, of course, have two fully-sentient sexes....
>
> Two sentient sexes, which we may call "Male-1" and "Male-2" (or
> whatever you like) and one non=sentient sex, the females.
The 'females' bred among themselves to reproduce, and didn't contribute
to
the Puppeteer genome. They aren't a Puppeteer sex, they're a seperate
species that the Puppeteers are either parasitic on or symbiotic with.
Tho' the fact that Nessus called them 'females' is interesting.
> >
> >The Kzinti are the famous example, although even they started out with
> >two sentient sexes: the males messed with genetic engineering to impose
> >an unnatural sex-linked limit on intelligence.
>
> Did they now. I didn't know about the Kzinti.
> >
> >Dorothy can doubtless cite two more smart-male dumb-female species from
> >Larry Niven's work. Known Space would be best, but any of his stories
> >will do.
>
> Well, I can think of the thrintun, who had dumb females and--
> I won't say smart, but slightly less dumb males. I can't think
> of any others, but then I quit reading Niven quite a while ago.
>
The Grogs had sentient, sessile females and dumb but mobile males. Of
course, they're arguably the scariest species in Known Space, since they
have the equivalent of the thrintun 'Power'.
Keith Morrison
> > >The Kzinti are the famous example, although even they started out with
> > >two sentient sexes: the males messed with genetic engineering to impose
> > >an unnatural sex-linked limit on intelligence.
> >
> > Did they now. I didn't know about the Kzinti.
>
> This is true only if you accept the Man-Kzin Wars series as canon.
Wasn't this also mentioned in _Ringworld Engineers_ when they go to
the various Maps and find Kzin?
In any event, I liked the bit in _Cathouse_ when the modern Kzin
discovers that he likes females who are as smart as he is.
--
Keith
Matt Hickman
>Actually, Louis Wu assumes that they did. The Ringworld kzinti who left
>the Map of Kzin to explore the Map of Down never returned; Wu says that
>they must have met grogs. Which seems a reasonable assumption.
>This would suggest that either
>1) The Pak were immune to the Grog power, or
Which brings up my favorite theory regarding the Pak -- that they were
developed by an unknown third species specifically to combat an
infestation of Slavers (perhaps a breeding pair escaped from an stasis
box, took over a planet and were about to build an FTL drive ).
Think about it. Pak could not be native to the Pak world. Some
form of early Hominid was kidknapped from Earth, genetically engineeered
into PAK and placed on the Pak world. The decendents of the Pak--
Homo Sapiens are definitely (genetically) native to Earth. It follows
that the Pak are also.
The adult Pak was developed to be immune to slaver POWER by being psychically
blind. Note the above. Note that Teela Brown lost her luck after eating from
the 'tree of life' and becoming an adult Pak. Immature Pak were still suceptable
-- which means that the adult Pak would exterminate any Slavers they found.
And the Pak is incredibly competent in the area of exterminating competition
-- without compunction -- without consideration that exterminating an
intelligent species might prompt the Pak's own extermination.
Note also the biological checks placed on the PAK -- dependence on a
specific virus in a specific plant to trigger the metamorphosis into adulthood.
The Pak planet was near the point of becoming uninhabitable as a result
of Pak warfare. This suggests anti-survival characteristics which would not evolve
naturally, but could be produced by genetic engineering.
The Pak are incredibly bright and competent yet were never able to develop
an FTL drive (nor were their decendents H. Sap) . This suggests a genetically
engineered blind spot in PAK intelligence to limit them from spreading too far.
That there is evidence of massive genetic differerences in the Human
genome suggests that the virus in the tree of life root is the source of the
genetic material which transforms a Pak breeder into an adult. Would such
a virus evolve naturally? No way.
Also note that on at least one occasion even breeder stage Pak were able to
defeat Slavers. Two occasions if you accept non-Niven Known Universe stories.
And that breeder stage Pak were able to deal successfully with the decendents
of Slavers -- the Grog.
Slavers had conquered the entire Milky Way prior to being wiped out. If there
were one or two stasis boxes with Slavers in the vicinity of Earth, how many
more are there elsewhere in the galaxy? And occasionally these Stasis
boxes must have been opened accidentally or purposefully elsewhere over
the last several million years. The Pak might be just one of a number of tools
developed to deal with these outbreaks.
--
Matt Hickman
If you believe in wavicles, you can believe in anything...
Robert A. Heinlein (1907 - 1988)
_Have Space Suit Will Travel_ c. 1958
Ross Presser
Morrison).wrote.posted.offered:
Chmee makes a similar discovery in _Ringworld Engineers_.
I don't think it was ever explicitly stated that genetic engineering was
used to reduce the female's intelligence. I thought of it more as a
product of artificial selection.
--
Ross Presser
ross_p...@imtek.com
"And if you're the kind of person who parties with a bathtub full of
pasta, I suspect you don't care much about cholesterol anyway."
Ross Presser
>The Grogs had sentient, sessile females and dumb but mobile males. Of
>course, they're arguably the scariest species in Known Space, since they
>have the equivalent of the thrintun 'Power'.
I remember it differently: Grog mobiles of both sexes breed; then they
become sessile and intelligent.
Del Cotter
Mark A Mandel <m...@world.std.com> wrote:
>Dorothy J Heydt (djh...@kithrup.com) wrote:
>
>: >The Puppeteers, of course, have two fully-sentient sexes....
>
>: Two sentient sexes, which we may call "Male-1" and "Male-2" (or
>: whatever you like) and one non=sentient sex, the females.
>
>Two sentient sexes, one of which is sperm-bearing and one egg-bearing
>(thus close to our concept of biologically male and female resp.), and
>a nonsentient "sex" in whose body the eggs are incubated, which has an
>entirely separate mode of reproduction: in fact, a different species
>altogether. The Puppeteers proper lay their eggs in the flesh of the
>"incubators". "No wonder the Puppeteers don't like to talk about it", our
>hero thinks.
Or as I sometimes say, that's like calling humans the third sex of
botfly.
Keith Morrison
> >In any event, I liked the bit in _Cathouse_ when the modern Kzin
> >discovers that he likes females who are as smart as he is.
>
> Chmee makes a similar discovery in _Ringworld Engineers_.
>
> I don't think it was ever explicitly stated that genetic engineering was
> used to reduce the female's intelligence. I thought of it more as a
> product of artificial selection.
That's the impression I got. I think Ing had a comment in _Cathouse_
about a breeding program that eliminated intelligence in females a
long time ago.
Given Chmee's opinion after meeting sentient female Kzinti, the
argument that Niven is a sexist based on his creating the Kzinti
starts to run a bit thin. The two times modern Kzinti have met
descendants of their ancestors (once written by Niven, the other
approved by him, I would imagine) that I know of, the males find
competent, intelligent females to be far more appealing than the
pure sex and breeding toys they had grown up with.
--
Keith
Steve Parker
Hickman) wrote:
>Think about it. Pak could not be native to the Pak world
Why?
Steve
--
Hugo-Reviews Page (with cover scans) at
http://www.mindspring.com/~sparker9/home2.html
Steve Parker
<Niall....@eei.ericsson.es> wrote:
>Now *there's* an idea. Why would anyone build a mad structure like
>Ringworld? To keep the maximum amount of habitable space within
>brain's reach of the ruling GrogThis may beat out my previous best
>retcon for the nonsense presented in _Protector_.
I liked _Protector_. What nonsense? Or did you mean _Ringworld
Throne_?
Del Cotter
>kei...@polarnet.ca (Keith Morrison) wrote
>
>>Wasn't this also mentioned in _Ringworld Engineers_ when they go to
>>the various Maps and find Kzin?
>>
>>In any event, I liked the bit in _Cathouse_ when the modern Kzin
>>discovers that he likes females who are as smart as he is.
>
>Chmee makes a similar discovery in _Ringworld Engineers_.
>
>I don't think it was ever explicitly stated that genetic engineering was
>used to reduce the female's intelligence. I thought of it more as a
>product of artificial selection.
I said genetic engineering because you can't do artificial selection on
one sex only. For obvious reasons.
Matt Hickman
>On Fri, 10 Dec 1999 11:08:45 -0600, hem...@attglobal.net (Matt Hickman)
>wrote:
>>Think about it. Pak could not be native to the Pak world
>Why?
H. Sap is decended from the Pak. Yet H. Sap is morphologically
and genetically related all other life on Earth. Humans fit very nicely
into the evolutionary scheme of things on Earth down to our DNA.
That our species derived from an evolution and mophology alien
to Earth is essentially impossible (I would guess on the order of
one chance in 1 X 10 to the millionth power).
H. Sap is decendent of the Pak, QED the Pak had their
origins on Earth and are therfore not native to the Pak world.
I did mention this chain of logic in my original post.
--
Matt Hickman
... a Heidelburg duel. They pad your body and arm and neck and
put a steel guard on your eyes and nose and across your ears --
this is not like encountering a pragmatic Marxist in the jungle.
Robert A. Heinlein (1907 - 1988)
_Glory Road_ 1963
Dave Godwin
"Matt Hickman" <hem...@attglobal.net> wrote in message
news:3851cec8$1$urzb_we$mr2...@news3.attglobal.net...
> H. Sap is decended from the Pak. Yet H. Sap is morphologically
> and genetically related all other life on Earth. Humans fit very nicely
> into the evolutionary scheme of things on Earth down to our DNA.
> That our species derived from an evolution and mophology alien
> to Earth is essentially impossible (I would guess on the order of
> one chance in 1 X 10 to the millionth power).
>
> H. Sap is decendent of the Pak, QED the Pak had their
> origins on Earth and are therfore not native to the Pak world.
> I did mention this chain of logic in my original post.
>
There's all kinds of SF from 30 years ago where you can point and criticize
the science. It's boring.
Brendan Macmillan
: <br...@molly.csse.monash.edu.au> wrote:
:>(Oh. Sherlock Holmes is puzzle fiction. And Holmes is not the narrator...)
: Holmes is not puzzle fiction in the same sense that, say, Agatha
: Christie is. The reader is not given a fair shot at reaching the
: conclusions first.
Interesting! So what's the point of his adventures? Hero worship? I've
suspected that of "whodunits", though.
Is Agatha Christie (or other "fair" puzzle writer) told from a single
protagonist's view?
James Nicoll
Probably obvious to the humans in the story as well, when they
sat down and thought about how the intelligent species in Known Space
have quite distinct basic structures from terrestrial mammals yet the Pak
don't.
--
Kristopher/EOS
>
> Also note that on at least one occasion even breeder
> stage Pak were able to defeat Slavers. Two occasions
> if you accept non-Niven Known Universe stories. And
> that breeder stage Pak were able to deal successfully
> with the decendents of Slavers -- the Grog.
The Grog are far too unlike the Slavers, with the exception
of one single thing, "The Power." Given the number of times
that things such as eyes and flight and legs independently
evolved on earth, I don't find that one connection a very
compelling connection.
Kristopher/EOS
gromgorru
Del Cotter wrote in message ...
>
>So, that's one dumb-male species, one dumb-female species, and one
>equally-smart species. It looks to me as if Niven was playing with
>various possibilities. What a sexist pig, eh?
Pak breeders are presentient, whereas protectors are supersentient.
Clearly an Ageist. :-)
Dave Godwin
Duh. It's still boring.
"James Nicoll" <jam...@nyquist.uwaterloo.ca> wrote in message
news:82spht$o6j$1...@watserv3.uwaterloo.ca...
Jordan S. Bassior
>Two sentient sexes, which we may call "Male-1" and "Male-2" (or
>whatever you like) and one non=sentient sex, the females.
Actually, those aren't really "females". Those are another species entirely,
and the "impregnation" is more like the parasitization of an insect by a wasp.
Nessus was female, the Hindmost was male. The other species was simply a host.
>Did they now. I didn't know about the Kzinti.
Revealed in *Cathouse*.
>Well, I can think of the thrintun, who had dumb females and--
>I won't say smart, but slightly less dumb males.
The Slavers were basically Dumb and Dumber. And clearly inspired by the Cthulhu
Mythos, btw :)
Sincerely Yours,
Jordan
"Man, as we know him, is a poor creature; but he is halfway between an ape and
a god and he is travelling in the right direction." (Dean William R. Inge)
Nancy Lebovitz
Dave Godwin <dgo...@ncal.verio.com> wrote:
>
>"Matt Hickman" <hem...@attglobal.net> wrote in message
>news:3851cec8$1$urzb_we$mr2...@news3.attglobal.net...
>> H. Sap is decended from the Pak. Yet H. Sap is morphologically
>> and genetically related all other life on Earth. Humans fit very nicely
>> into the evolutionary scheme of things on Earth down to our DNA.
>> That our species derived from an evolution and mophology alien
>> to Earth is essentially impossible (I would guess on the order of
>> one chance in 1 X 10 to the millionth power).
>>
>> H. Sap is decendent of the Pak, QED the Pak had their
>> origins on Earth and are therfore not native to the Pak world.
>> I did mention this chain of logic in my original post.
>
>There's all kinds of SF from 30 years ago where you can point and criticize
>the science. It's boring.
>
science is part of the game.
>
>
>
--
Nancy Lebovitz na...@netaxs.com
October '99 calligraphic button catalogue available by email!
Leah Robin
<br...@molly.csse.monash.edu.au> wrote of Holmes:
> Interesting! So what's the point of his adventures? Hero worship? I've
> suspected that of "whodunits", though.
The point of his adventures was to push for scientific and empirical
thought and observation. Not a radical point today, but a newer kind
of deductive logic at the time of publication.
Plus, of course, his partnership with Watson is entertaining. Unlike
the old Holmes movies of the '30's, Watson is not written to be stupid
or bumbling-- his speculations go down the same paths as the readers',
but we don't possess the specialized knowledge of Holmes to reach
anything other than the most obvious (and wrong) conclusions.
Leah.
Robert Shaw
Matt Hickman <hem...@attglobal.net> wrote
> at 12:18 AM, Douglas Muir <dougla...@yale.edu> said:
>
> >Actually, Louis Wu assumes that they did. The Ringworld kzinti who left
> >the Map of Kzin to explore the Map of Down never returned; Wu says that
> >they must have met grogs. Which seems a reasonable assumption.
>
> >This would suggest that either
>
> >1) The Pak were immune to the Grog power, or
>
> Which brings up my favorite theory regarding the Pak -- that they were
> developed by an unknown third species specifically to combat an
> infestation of Slavers (perhaps a breeding pair escaped from an stasis
> box, took over a planet and were about to build an FTL drive ).
(Supporting evidence cut)
>
> Slavers had conquered the entire Milky Way prior to
> being wiped out. If there were one or two stasis boxes
> with Slavers in the vicinity of Earth, how many more are
> there elsewhere in the galaxy? And occasionally these Stasis
> boxes must have been opened accidentally or purposefully elsewhere over
> the last several million years. The Pak might be just one of a
> number of tools developed to deal with these outbreaks.
I've thought the same thing, but I suspect the Slavers weren't
the only target. There were also Tnuctipun, some of which should also
be in stasis boxes (as happens in one of the non-Niven stories). The
Tnuctipun are smart and dangerous. We don't know much about them,
but the Pak would probably be useful agents against the Tnuctipun too.
There could easily be a few dozen Pak homeworlds scattered across the
galaxy.
I'd think the Pak are capable of understanding FTL, but there are
non-biological factors that keep them from using it. The mass sensor
uses psi which the Pak don't have so that could be a handicap. All the
other organic races bought it from the outsiders, or got it sexond hand.
No one is likely to sell FTL to the Pak, unless they are feeling suicidal.
If inventing FTL requires experiments in deep space, at a safe distance
from the star, the Pak may not even consider working in such a mutagenic
environment. The risk is low and can easily be abolished, but not from
a Pak's viewpoint. They wouldn't want to leave their breeders on planet
either, they'd be too vulnerable.
The other option is that in the galactic core the stars are too close
together for FTL. Above some critical density, the FTL-blocked zones
round each star merge. None of the characters in the stories would know
if this were the case.
--
'It is a wise crow that knows which way the camel points' - Pratchett
Robert Shaw
Steve Charlton
In article <19991209020428...@ng-fx1.aol.com>, Voyl
<vo...@aol.com> writes
>Is it just me, or does Larry Niven's writing seem a more than just a bit
>sexist?
>
>Most good modern sci-fi writers employ strong female protagonists. Not Niven.
^^^^^^
Look at the dates most of his stories were written. 30 years ago!
<snip examples of stories with strong male leads>
>Is he really a misogynist or does he simply lack the ability to write female
>characters? Any thoughts?
In the 60's, the was no P.C. movement. Women's lib was in its infancy.
How many SF books were written then with strong female characters?
Precious few. Dr. Susan Calvin was probably the only one (though maybe
Jessica Attreides could be included?)
Who was SFs target audience back then? Not many women read SF (and not
because the lead roles were all male). Science (and Physics especially)
were not things women were particularly interested in(*1). How many
famous(*2) female scientists were there? Marie Curie was one, how many
others?
These days, the younger writers do have strong female leads. Marian
O'hara, Dzeit Sma, <aims at foot and pulls trigger> Friday Jones, <and
again> Moreta/Lessa/Menolly. Ok, so some of the older writers have
written recent stories with strong female leads too. But has Clarke?,
did Asimov?
<slightly out of group> What about Clive Cussler or Tom Clancy? Modern
writers, one older, one not so. No strong female leads there. Why pick
on Niven alone?
*1. Whether by nature or nurture I know not - its a fact though.
*2. Famous is here defined as "known to the general public".
--
Steve Charlton |There may be intelligent life on other planets
st...@gnirekoms.freeserve.co.uk |in the galaxy, but somebody, somewhere, had to
sdrawkcab=backwards |be first.
Carl Sagan (sadly missed)
Mark-Jason Dominus
Matt Hickman <hem...@attglobal.net> wrote:
>In <2f435sgcmrkflq2r0...@4ax.com>, on 12/10/99
> at 04:51 PM, Steve Parker <spar...@mindspring.com> said:
>
>>On Fri, 10 Dec 1999 11:08:45 -0600, hem...@attglobal.net (Matt Hickman)
>>wrote:
>
>>>Think about it. Pak could not be native to the Pak world
>
>>Why?
>
>and genetically related all other life on Earth. Humans fit very nicely
>into the evolutionary scheme of things on Earth down to our DNA.
The DNA part is fine, because Pak and earth life are both descended
from Slaver food yeast. The problem is with the morphology.
Pete McCutchen
wrote:
>I had a much more favorable opinion of Niven before I met him in the
>mid 1980's. Very rude.
Context?
--
Pete McCutchen
Matt Hickman
>I'd think the Pak are capable of understanding FTL, but there are
>non-biological factors that keep them from using it. The mass sensor uses
>psi which the Pak don't have so that could be a handicap. All the other
>organic races bought it from the outsiders, or got it sexond hand. No one
>is likely to sell FTL to the Pak, unless they are feeling suicidal.
No one knows where the Outsiders got their FTL. They might have develped
it themselves (but since they don't use it, their incentive to develop it
would be couriosity or trade). It is also possible that they traded for
it. Outsiders have been around for a long time. They might even have
traded for it prior to the Slaver empire.
Speaking of which -- the Slavers used an FTL drive other than that
sold by the Outsiders. This suggests that they did not get their FTL
drive from the Outsiders nor trade it to them. And, IIRC, they had
several FTL methods (developed by their slaves for them?).
We only know about the origins of FTL technology in the sphere of
Known Space. Did the race that Luis Wu found while looking for
stasis boxes get their FTL from the Outsiders? I think the Puppeteers
got it from the Outsiders, but I'm not positive about this. We do know
that Humans got FTL from the Outsiders.
>inventing FTL requires experiments in deep space, at a safe distance from
>the star, the Pak may not even consider working in such a mutagenic
>environment.
The Human Pak Brennan monster spent a significant number of years
in deep space. Perhaps he just didn't have the couriosity needed to
make a serendipitous discovery of FTL principals.
>The risk is low and can easily be abolished, but not from a
>Pak's viewpoint. They wouldn't want to leave their breeders on planet
>either, they'd be too vulnerable.
> The other option is that in the galactic core the stars are too close
>together for FTL. Above some critical density, the FTL-blocked zones
>round each star merge. None of the characters in the stories would know
>if this were the case.
In that case, the FTL drive Beowulf Shaeffer used in "At the Core"
would not have got him as far as it did -- certainly he got past Pak
Home.
--
Matt Hickman
...under Cherenkov drive she cranks Mike 400 or better--say Sol
to Capella, forty-six light-years, in under six weeks.
- Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988)
_Starship Troopers_ (c 1959)
James Nicoll
>
>The DNA part is fine, because Pak and earth life are both descended
>from Slaver food yeast. The problem is with the morphology.
Don't forget the genetic "clock" argument: if the last time
the Pak and the rest of Terrestrial life had a common ancestor was
1.5 billion years ago, this would be obvious looking at the DNA. Not
that Niven would have known this in the mid-1960s.
--
Matt Hickman
>The DNA part is fine, because Pak and earth life are both descended from
>Slaver food yeast. The problem is with the morphology.
Not exactly right. The most 'primitive' cellular life on
Earth have one or two fewer DNA code sequences than
every other living cell on the planet. This more primitve life
would be more likely to be using the DNA code of the Slaver
food yeast, and the other code or codes evolving later and
being exclusive to Earth life.
Add, the similarity and apparent relatedness of DNA
sequences between humans and other species with an
organized nucleus. The structure of chromosomes, the
existence of intracellular oganelles such as mitochondira,
golgi bodies, centrioles and endoplasmic reticula and you
get overwhelming proof of H. Sap relatedness to rest of
life on the Earth.
I read "The Adults" when it first came out in _Galaxy_
magazine. I was in high school at the time and even
then I knew the idea of Humans originating from an
alien species was nonsense. When Niven incorporated it
into Know Space with _Protector_ I had a real problem
suspending my disbelief. But The James Hogan published
_Inherit the Stars_ and I realized a way I could suspend
my disbelief after all. ;)
Fifteen or twenty years before Niven wrote "The Adults"
Heinlein worte (IIRC in essay "On the Writing of Science
Fiction") that if an SF writer is going to write a story
where Humans originated off Earth, that writer would need
to explain away the apparent similarities between Humans
and the rest of life on Earth. Niven did not do that. And
he should have known better -- and his editor Fred Pohl
should not have let him get away with it without at least
some more plausible hand-waving than 'all life everywhere
originated from Slaver food yeast.'
--
Matt Hickman
The simple life is all right for a few days vacation. But
day in and day out it's just so much back breaking drudgery.
Romantic? Hell, man, there's no time to be romantic about
it, and damned little incentive. (J Darlington Smith)
- Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988)
_Beyond this Horizon_ (c. 1942)
Elisabeth Carey
>
> <x-posted to ln news group for completeness>
> In article <19991209020428...@ng-fx1.aol.com>, Voyl
> <vo...@aol.com> writes
> >Is it just me, or does Larry Niven's writing seem a more than just a bit
> >sexist?
> >
> >Most good modern sci-fi writers employ strong female protagonists. Not Niven.
> ^^^^^^
> Look at the dates most of his stories were written. 30 years ago!
>
> <snip examples of stories with strong male leads>
>
> >Is he really a misogynist or does he simply lack the ability to write female
> >characters? Any thoughts?
> In the 60's, the was no P.C. movement. Women's lib was in its infancy.
> How many SF books were written then with strong female characters?
> Precious few. Dr. Susan Calvin was probably the only one (though maybe
> Jessica Attreides could be included?)
Clarissa MacDougal and Virgilia Samms, both from the works of a writer
who isn't generally held up as a model of ground-breaking gender
relations in fiction.
Heinlein in the forties and fifties had bunches of strong female
characters--not usually the lead, and he had annoying numbers of
dippy, stereotypical females as minor characters, too, but he had
strong female characters. H. Beam Piper had Princess Rylla in the Lord
Kalvan stories.
That's with minimal thought and no effort. There weren't many female
leads being written by male sf writers prior to the 1970s, but there
were strong female characters.
> Who was SFs target audience back then? Not many women read SF (and not
> because the lead roles were all male).
Lots of girls and women were reading sf. They weren't as visible, and
there was a strong tendency to assume that they weren't there, but
they were.
> Science (and Physics especially)
> were not things women were particularly interested in(*1).
Rescuing your footnote from the bottom, to respond to it in proper
context:
> *1. Whether by nature or nurture I know not - its a fact though.
Well, yes, actually, you do know whether it was nature or nurture: the
nurture has changed, and the numbers of women going into scientific
fields, including physics, is up rather considerably.
But even the base assumption, that women were not going into these
fields because they were not interested, is not well-supported. There
were significant social pressures on girls not to appear too "brainy";
girls who resisted or avoided those pressures did the most amazing
things. (Rosalyn Yalow had a chemistry teacher who encouraged her; she
pursued a career in chemistry and did the work for which she later won
the Nobel Prize in 1959.)
> How many
> famous(*2) female scientists were there? Marie Curie was one, how many
> others?
Again, rescuing the footnote:
> *2. Famous is here defined as "known to the general public".
Not too many, but that's hardly the point, is it? There were women
reading sf, and women writing sf, and there were women interested in
science, and women pursuing science careers--and there were strong
female characters present, in small numbers, in the work of a variety
of sf male sf writers. They were rarely the leads, and they weren't
present in large numbers, but they existed.
> These days, the younger writers do have strong female leads. Marian
> O'hara, Dzeit Sma, <aims at foot and pulls trigger> Friday Jones, <and
> again> Moreta/Lessa/Menolly. Ok, so some of the older writers have
> written recent stories with strong female leads too. But has Clarke?,
> did Asimov?
Asimov has Susan Calvin, Arkady Darell, and Dors Venabili; Arkady's a
lead--and not even recent.
But comparing Niven to Asimov and Clarke is an odd choice, if you mean
to suggest that it's unreasonable to expect sf writers of a certain
generation to have strong female leads: Clarke was born in 1917,
Asimov in 1920--and Niven in 1938. Niven was still a relatively young
man when women started more aggressively pursuing careers and equal
rights. And Heinlein, born in 1907, has more strong female characters
than any of these three, for all the problems with presentation,
especially in his later works.
> <slightly out of group> What about Clive Cussler or Tom Clancy? Modern
> writers, one older, one not so. No strong female leads there. Why pick
> on Niven alone?
Cussler and Clancy aren't major topics of discussion in r.a.s.f.w.,
and they're not writing in a genre where there have been lots of
prominent women writers for two or three decades, now.
Lis Carey
Shaad M. Ahmad
>In article <82sddi$7s5$1...@towncrier.cc.monash.edu.au>, Brendan Macmillan
><br...@molly.csse.monash.edu.au> wrote of Holmes:
>> Interesting! So what's the point of his adventures? Hero worship? I've
>> suspected that of "whodunits", though.
Leah Robin <led...@bellsouth.net> wrote in article
<111219991042414288%led...@bellsouth.net>:
>The point of his adventures was to push for scientific and empirical
>thought and observation. Not a radical point today, but a newer kind
>of deductive logic at the time of publication.
>Plus, of course, his partnership with Watson is entertaining. Unlike
>the old Holmes movies of the '30's, Watson is not written to be stupid
>or bumbling-- his speculations go down the same paths as the readers',
>but we don't possess the specialized knowledge of Holmes to reach
>anything other than the most obvious (and wrong) conclusions.
Precisely. I'd also add (to bring this back into the original
thread) that Conan Doyle's portrayal of women in the Holmes corpus,
while not that very frequent, was largely sypathetic and non-sexist
(strong, sometimes very intelligent, often quite supportive characters,
not given to the swooning and hysterics that was so very popular in
this genre at the time).
And while this is going off at a tangent, do readers like Laurie
R. King's Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes books? I found the notion of a
retired Holmes faced with a young woman with equally acute powers of
observation and deduction to be quite appealing.
Regards.
sh...@leland.stanford.edu - Shaad -
http://cmgm.stanford.edu/~ahmad/
the deviant biologist
Keith Morrison
> Fifteen or twenty years before Niven wrote "The Adults"
> Heinlein worte (IIRC in essay "On the Writing of Science
> Fiction") that if an SF writer is going to write a story
> where Humans originated off Earth, that writer would need
> to explain away the apparent similarities between Humans
> and the rest of life on Earth. Niven did not do that. And
> he should have known better -- and his editor Fred Pohl
> should not have let him get away with it without at least
> some more plausible hand-waving than 'all life everywhere
> originated from Slaver food yeast.'
Yep. Even without genetics the problem becomes serious. Physiology
alone would make an ET-origin virtually impossible unless one was
speculating on aliens fooling with Earth-derived organisms to create
humans by influencing evolution. That one can still work.
--
Keith
Leah Robin
<sh...@leland.Stanford.EDU> wrote:
> Precisely. I'd also add (to bring this back into the original
> thread) that Conan Doyle's portrayal of women in the Holmes corpus,
> while not that very frequent, was largely sypathetic and non-sexist
> (strong, sometimes very intelligent, often quite supportive characters,
> not given to the swooning and hysterics that was so very popular in
> this genre at the time).
Only if one ignores the disparity between what Holmes says and what he
does-- he *says* he doesn't like women because he believes them (or
should I say us?) inferior. He likes and praises strong, clever, and
determined women. He does consider them the exception to the norm,
though.
> And while this is going off at a tangent, do readers like Laurie
> R. King's Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes books? I found the notion of a
> retired Holmes faced with a young woman with equally acute powers of
> observation and deduction to be quite appealing.
I do! They're wonderful books and she makes the relationship between
Mary Russell and Holmes plausible.
Leah.
Wim Lewis
Del Cotter <d...@branta.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>On Fri, 10 Dec 1999, in rec.arts.sf.written
>Ross Presser <rpre...@NOSPAMimtek.com.invalid> wrote:
>>I don't think it was ever explicitly stated that genetic engineering was
>>used to reduce the female's intelligence. I thought of it more as a
>>product of artificial selection.
>
>I said genetic engineering because you can't do artificial selection on
>one sex only. For obvious reasons.
Why not? Can't you just kill (or promote to honorary male status, or otherwise
take out of the breeding pool) the smart females, and kill (or etc.) the
stupid males? It may be a while before a random mutation produces a sex-
linked gene that affects intelligence, but once it does, you'll be selecting
strongly for that gene. And it would be very reasonable to say that the
Kzin ended up breeding unintelligent females *because* they happened to
have such a gene, and their cultural breeding patterns acted upon it.
We don't even know that Kzinti sex is determined the same way ours is.
Maybe it's not even a chromosome; it could be womb environment, or something
along those lines.
--
Wim Lewis * wi...@hhhh.org * Seattle, WA, USA
Georgiana Gates
polite. But our interaction consisted of
"Thank you for signing."
"Thank you for buying my book."
Shaad M. Ahmad
>In article <82uean$7...@epic6.Stanford.EDU>, Shaad M. Ahmad
><sh...@leland.Stanford.EDU> wrote:
>
>> Precisely. I'd also add (to bring this back into the original
>> thread) that Conan Doyle's portrayal of women in the Holmes corpus,
>> while not that very frequent, was largely sypathetic and non-sexist
>> (strong, sometimes very intelligent, often quite supportive characters,
>> not given to the swooning and hysterics that was so very popular in
>> this genre at the time).
Leah Robin <led...@bellsouth.net> wrote in article
<111219991636573119%led...@bellsouth.net>:
>Only if one ignores the disparity between what Holmes says and what he
>does-- he *says* he doesn't like women because he believes them (or
>should I say us?) inferior. He likes and praises strong, clever, and
>determined women. He does consider them the exception to the norm,
>though.
True, although I was referring more to Conan Doyle's portrayal
of women than to Holme's opinion of them. That said, I had the impression
(though I don't believe Holmes ever explicitly says this) that Holmes
felt this way about most people, regardless of gender.
Steve Charlton
<dougla...@yale.edu> writes
>> Lucky, lucky grogs that they never showed themselves to the Pak
>> who collected lifeforms for the Ringworld.
>
>Actually, Louis Wu assumes that they did. The Ringworld kzinti who left the
>have met grogs. Which seems a reasonable assumption.
>
>This would suggest that either
>
>1) The Pak were immune to the Grog power, or
>
>from a safe distance away, and then to capture some grogs for transport.
>
3) The Pak found the Grogs and the Grogs did a deal. They are
intelligent after all.
>Either way, the fact that the Pak didn't consider the grogs dangerous enough
>to be worth exterminating suggests that their power really is as limited as
>they say. Heck, it must be. Otherwise, they'd be running the whole Ringworld.
There may even have been Grogs used as guards or some such, if the Grogs
thought it was in their own interest. There is a *lot* of the Ringworld
that we haven't seen and the Meteor Defence is singularly ineffective
against any approaching enemy in the plane of the ring.
Steve Charlton
>H. Sap is decended from the Pak. Yet H. Sap is morphologically
>and genetically related all other life on Earth. Humans fit very nicely
>into the evolutionary scheme of things on Earth down to our DNA.
>to Earth is essentially impossible (I would guess on the order of
>one chance in 1 X 10 to the millionth power).
>
>H. Sap is decendent of the Pak, QED the Pak had their
>origins on Earth and are therfore not native to the Pak world.
>I did mention this chain of logic in my original post.
knows what tricks the Tnuctipun may have played on the food yeast's
genetic code?
Danny Sichel
> like thirty years now to the same woman. Speculating about the inside of
> his skull is unwise.
I bet it's dark and squishy.
Charles T. Biggs
Brendan Macmillan wrote in message
<82qda6$4qu$1...@towncrier.cc.monash.edu.au>...
>:>
>: In another story, an ignorant woman
>:>tourist almost wrecks an entire colony
>:>
>
> "FLARE TIME"
>
Thanks for the answer. Now for part two of the question: is this the
story Voyl was referring to? (It's been a good while since I've read this
story and I have totally forgotten who wrote it and where I first read it.)
Chris
Alan
>Del Cotter <d...@branta.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>>On Fri, 10 Dec 1999, in rec.arts.sf.written
>>Ross Presser <rpre...@NOSPAMimtek.com.invalid> wrote:
>>>I don't think it was ever explicitly stated that genetic engineering was
>>>used to reduce the female's intelligence. I thought of it more as a
>>>product of artificial selection.
>>
>>I said genetic engineering because you can't do artificial selection on
>>one sex only. For obvious reasons.
The "obvious reason" being I suppose that intelligence is not linked
to gender. Not proven for humans, let alone kzin. Anyway, consider a
hormone produced by females only, or much more than males, that has a
side effect of reducing intelligence. Like, but much more than, (the
stereotypical behavior of) women getting less rational during their
periods, or during pregnancy.
Conversely, who says this is really genetic? Perhaps at birth all
female kzin are suffocated for 10 minutes or so, enough to kill off a
sufficient percentage of brain cells. It could be done as a
purification ritual, with very few actually aware of what was
happening.
Brendan Macmillan
: Brendan Macmillan wrote in message
:>: In another story, an ignorant woman
:>:>tourist almost wrecks an entire colony
:> "FLARE TIME"
: Thanks for the answer. Now for part two of the question:
Sorry, it was meant to link the two quoted posts. I guess two words is
just a bit too concise.
: is this the story Voyl was referring to?
Yup. It's the only Niven story anywhere close. Probably because, uh,
it's the only one with a female protagonist.
: (It's been a good while since I've read this
: story and I have totally forgotten who wrote it and where I first read it.)
I've seen it in the collection "Limits" (published by Orbit) - which had
a picture of the sometime-six legged beasties on the front, despite the
title "Limits" being of an entirely different story in the collection.
I also saw it in "N-Space", that the original poster read - which is the
other reason why I'm so sure.
Brendan
--
Brendan Macmillan
br...@csse.monash.edu.au +61 (3) 9587 2117 tel: +61 (3) 9905 5194
Email is checked daily voice mail Phone is rarely attended
In an Austrian hotel catering to skiers: Not to perambulate the
corriders during the hours of repose in the boots of ascension.
Stewart Robert Hinsley
<wi...@netcom.com> writes
>
>We don't even know that Kzinti sex is determined the same way ours is.
>Maybe it's not even a chromosome; it could be womb environment, or something
>along those lines.
>
is the same as in birds, i.e. it is chromosomal, with females being the
heterogametic sex.
--
Stewart Robert Hinsley I support exspamination.
http://www.meden.demon.co.uk/
Stewart Robert Hinsley
>
>The DNA part is fine, because Pak and earth life are both descended
>from Slaver food yeast. The problem is with the morphology.
The DNA part is not fine. Common descent from Slaver food yeast
(presumably an archaea/bacteria, rather than a proper yeast) would
result in DNA no more similar to a sample primate's than _E. coli_'s.
--
Stewart Robert Hinsley The adequate is the enemy of the good
Del Cotter
gromgorru <grom...@internet-zahav.net> wrote:
>Pak breeders are presentient, whereas protectors are supersentient.
>Clearly an Ageist. :-)
Long ago, someone said "give me seven lines written by the best of men,
and I will find there something with which to hang him." I have long
been struck by the misogynistic streak of the well-known author LM
Bujold.
(spoilers for various LMB novels, inc. the latest, _A Civil Campaign_)
Bujold clearly longs for a world without women. Consider:
# At the end of _Cetaganda_, The villainess haut Vio is forced to become
an androgyne. This is seen as only her just desserts (compare the
punishment of Shylock in the anti-semitic :Merchant of Venice:).
# The sympathetic character Lady Donna Vorrutyer [_A Civil Campaign_]
goes to Beta to become Lord Dono, and (like Jessica in :tMoV:) is
delighted by the change.
# Cordelia Naismith [_Barrayar_], like Niven's Puppeteers, is not really
female at all, but just another kind of male; she deposits her gametes
in an incubator, instead of bearing her children herself. (our hero
Aral Vorkosigan always preferred other men, and married Cordelia
because she was more mannish than the Vor ladies at home - it's all so
clear!)
# In contrast to the positively-portrayed Betans, who produce mannish
women, hermaphrodites and F-to-M transsexuals, the sinister genetic
engineers of Jackson's Hole create Taura, a super-warrior who is
female *by design*, capable of breeding more of her kind
["Labyrinth"]. Here we see Bujold's fear of the womb reified.
# Sergeant Beatrice, in "The Borders of Infinity", is tossed out of a
spaceship in the middle of a vitally-important rescue mission due to
her own carelessness, and we all know what *that* means (see Kessel,
on "The Cold Equations").
# In _Ethan of Athos_, the author even fantasizes about an entire
*planet* free of women.
So, judging by the ineluctable masculinity of his writing, I think we
can safely strip away the crude pseudonym of "Lois" and reveal that
woman-hating chauvinist, Louis McMaster Bujold!
(mind you, having seen him at conventions, I have to say that's a
*goood* disguise)
--
Del Cotter d...@branta.demon.co.uk
"Choose the Dark Side... now why would I do a thing like that?"
--Obi-Wan Renton
Matt Hickman
>Both H.Sap and Pak are decended from Tnuctipun created food yeast. Who
>knows what tricks the Tnuctipun may have played on the food yeast's
>genetic code?
If they were that smart, they would have survived the Slaver genocide and
would have be ruling the universe a looong time. All it would take would
be for a few Tnuctipun to pu themselves in statis when the call went out
to die, then automatically be released aftwerwards. Maybe they tried that
and some outside force intervened? Or there is a Tnuctipun planet some
where which failed to come out of stasis at the right time?
Anyway, if primitive, undifferentiated monist cells are programmed to
produce Humans, it is so subtle as to be nonexistent.
--
Matt Hickman
Herr Eisenberg looked horrified. 'Cannibals? Oh,
no lady! They don't eat each other, they just eat
us -- when they can get us, that is.'
- Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988)
_Starman Jones_ (c. 1953)
Jim Lovejoy
>
> Del Cotter wrote in message ...
>
> >
> >So, that's one dumb-male species, one dumb-female species, and one
> >equally-smart species. It looks to me as if Niven was playing with
> >various possibilities. What a sexist pig, eh?
>
> Pak breeders are presentient, whereas protectors are supersentient.
> Clearly an Ageist. :-)
Nah. Since they only become supersentient by taking "drugs". He his
clearly a, a -- uh help me out here. Pothead doesn't work, nor does
drug pusher, the best I can think or is "drug culture glorifier", but
clumsy is an understatement for the phrase.
Richard Harter
Hickman) wrote:
>In <Hy2HRZAB...@smokering.freeserve.co.uk>, on 12/11/99
> at 10:40 AM, Steve Charlton <st...@nospam.freeserve.co.uk> said:
>
>>Both H.Sap and Pak are decended from Tnuctipun created food yeast. Who
>>knows what tricks the Tnuctipun may have played on the food yeast's
>>genetic code?
>
>If they were that smart, they would have survived the Slaver genocide and
>would have be ruling the universe a looong time. All it would take would
>be for a few Tnuctipun to pu themselves in statis when the call went out
>to die, then automatically be released aftwerwards. Maybe they tried that
>and some outside force intervened? Or there is a Tnuctipun planet some
>where which failed to come out of stasis at the right time?
>
>Anyway, if primitive, undifferentiated monist cells are programmed to
>produce Humans, it is so subtle as to be nonexistent.
No, no, no, that's not how it was done. What they did was create the
Mother Amoeba. The Mother Amoeba has a very secure genome; it also
has special organelles which generate specialized retroviruses which
are continually released into the biosphere. These retroviruses come
in several sorts: There are correctors which correct minor genetic
errors in the target population; there are modifiers which add new
genetic material to the target population; and there are killers which
eliminate organisms which deviate too far from the master plan.
Earth and the Pak world got the same Mother Amoeba; on Earth, however,
the Mother Amoeba died about some millions of years ago which is why
the Tree of Life virus never showed up on time.
Richard Harter, c...@tiac.net
http://www.tiac.net/users/cri
I have been waging relentless war on reality;
So far reality is ahead, 0 to -1.
Dwight Thieme
Dwight Thieme
: <x-posted to ln news group for completeness>
: In article <19991209020428...@ng-fx1.aol.com>, Voyl
: <vo...@aol.com> writes
: >Is it just me, or does Larry Niven's writing seem a more than just a bit
: >sexist?
: >
: >Most good modern sci-fi writers employ strong female protagonists. Not Niven.
: ^^^^^^
: Look at the dates most of his stories were written. 30 years ago!
: <snip examples of stories with strong male leads>
: >Is he really a misogynist or does he simply lack the ability to write female
: >characters? Any thoughts?
: In the 60's, the was no P.C. movement. Women's lib was in its infancy.
: How many SF books were written then with strong female characters?
: Precious few. Dr. Susan Calvin was probably the only one (though maybe
: Jessica Attreides could be included?)
Heh. I'm a big fan of James Schmitz, and he wrote little but
strong female characters as his main leads. And this was in
the 50's.
Ike
P.D. TILLMAN
I trust you sent a copy to Lois, er, Louis?
Cheers - Pete Tillman
--
"A recent survey of 2,000 male graduates of Harvard Business School
found that penis length & IQ were equally good predictors of annual
income." -- Greg Egan, in "Eugene"
In a previous article, d...@branta.demon.co.uk (Del Cotter) says:
>On Sat, 11 Dec 1999, in rec.arts.sf.written
>gromgorru <grom...@internet-zahav.net> wrote:
>
>>Pak breeders are presentient, whereas protectors are supersentient.
>>Clearly an Ageist. :-)
>
--
Robert Shaw
Matt Hickman <hem...@attglobal.net> wrote
> at 12:41 AM, "Robert Shaw" <Rob...@shavian.fsnet.co.uk> said:
> >inventing FTL requires experiments in deep space, at a safe distance from
> >the star, the Pak may not even consider working in such a mutagenic
> >environment.
>
> The Human Pak Brennan monster spent a significant number of years
> in deep space. Perhaps he just didn't have the couriosity needed to
> make a serendipitous discovery of FTL principals.
>
He didn't have any breeders to worry about, but he was strongly
focused on reaching earth. Experimenting on FTL might be viewed
as a needless diversion. I'd agree the Pak aren't that curious. They
concentrate on things with immediate application. Would trying to
invent FTL give them enough drive to keep a breederless Pak from
dieing?
> >The risk is low and can easily be abolished, but not from a
> >Pak's viewpoint. They wouldn't want to leave their breeders on planet
> >either, they'd be too vulnerable.
> > The other option is that in the galactic core the stars are too close
> >together for FTL. Above some critical density, the FTL-blocked zones
> >round each star merge. None of the characters in the stories would know
> >if this were the case.
>
> In that case, the FTL drive Beowulf Shaeffer used in "At the Core"
> would not have got him as far as it did -- certainly he got past Pak
> Home.
>
The galactic core explosion could have changed conditions, but
I'd forgotten how far Beowulf got. His ship used a faster hyperdrive
which may not have been subject to the same constraints. That isn't
explicitly ruled out. It's more likely though that Pak culture prevents
them from inventing FTL, and no-one is willing to sell it to them.
Indeed I suspect that after a few early incidents no non-Pak go near
the Pak homeworld.
--
'It is a wise crow that knows which way the camel points' - Pratchett
Robert Shaw
Matt Hickman
>Matt Hickman <hem...@attglobal.net> wrote
>> at 12:41 AM, "Robert Shaw" <Rob...@shavian.fsnet.co.uk> said:
>>>inventing FTL requires experiments in deep space, at a safedistancefrom
>> The Human Pak Brennan monster spent a significant number of years
>> in deep space. Perhaps he just didn't have the couriosity needed to
>> make a serendipitous discovery of FTL principals.
>He didn't have any breeders to worry about, but he was strongly focused
>on reaching earth. Experimenting on FTL might be viewed as a needless
>diversion.
Brennan knew the core had exploded. He knew that the Pak was on its way
to save/destroy Earth. I'd say he had an immediate application for FTL.
That he knew the core exploded is also an indication that he was smarter
than the entire Puppeteer species.
--
Matt Hickman
Thorby's wounds healed, those outside more quickly, those inside
more slowly, The old beggar acquired another mattress and stuck
it in the other corner. But Baslim would sometimes wake to find
a small warm bundle snuggled against his spine and know thereby
that the boy had had another nightmare. Baslim was a light sleeper
and hated sharing a bed. But he never forced Thorby to go back to his
own bed when this happened.
- Robert A. Heinlein (1907 - 1988)
_Citizen of the Galaxy_ (1957)
Matt Hickman
--
-----------------------------------------------------------
hem...@attglobal.net (Matt Hickman)
-----------------------------------------------------------
Robert Shaw
Richard Harter <c...@tiac.net> wrote
> > at 10:40 AM, Steve Charlton <st...@nospam.freeserve.co.uk> said:
> >
> >>Both H.Sap and Pak are decended from Tnuctipun created food yeast. Who
> >>knows what tricks the Tnuctipun may have played on the food yeast's
> >>genetic code?
>
> Mother Amoeba. The Mother Amoeba has a very secure genome; it also
> has special organelles which generate specialized retroviruses which
> are continually released into the biosphere. These retroviruses come
> in several sorts: There are correctors which correct minor genetic
> errors in the target population; there are modifiers which add new
> genetic material to the target population; and there are killers which
> eliminate organisms which deviate too far from the master plan.
>
> Earth and the Pak world got the same Mother Amoeba; on Earth, however,
> the Mother Amoeba died about some millions of years ago which is why
> the Tree of Life virus never showed up on time.
Why would the Tnuctipun want to produce Pak? The Pak would not
serve them willingly, they would be rivals. It might be that the Pak are
the Tnuctipin recreated, but Kzanol should have noticed if humans
looked familiar.
A Tnuctipun-Pak conflict would be interesting to watch, from a
safe distance. We don't know what really caused the core explosion
either.
The Mother Amoeba is one improbability too many for me.
It would have to containat a minimum the entire functional
human genetic code, code for large parts of the ecosystem
(to ensure the food that evolves is edible) and regulatory genes
that can tell exactly what stage evolution has reached. It would be
too vulnerable to genetic damage.
Matt Hickman
at 12:20 AM, c...@tiac.net (Richard Harter) said:
>Oh come now. The Mother Amoeba is big. The human genome fits quite
>nicely inside the nucleus of a human cell. Ye typical speciman of homer
>sap contains some trillions of cells. The Mother Amoeba is a blob of
>about human size. It has encysted within it trillions of genomes,
>waiting for use. There are, BTW, single celled organisms larger than
>human beings (certain species of plants) with numerous nuclei so don't
>jump on that one. Genetic damage is mostly a matter of tradeoffs -
>biological error reduction can be made arbitrarily small but the cost is
>too high for replicating organisms. It's cheaper to accept an error
>rate.
If a "Mother Amoeba" existed, It would probably (IMHO) be implemented in
a Bandersnatch. Bandersnatchi (if they ever existed on Earth) went
extinct on here so long ago that even their massive skeletons cannot be
found.
If you want to see the results look at Jinx.
--
Matt Hickman
Some of these young oafs have yet to learn that when
Grandmother speaks, she means business.
- Robert A. Heinlein _Citizen of the Galaxy_
Jorj Strumolo
RH> No, no, no, that's not how it was done. What they did was create the
> Mother Amoeba. The Mother Amoeba has a very secure genome; it also
> has special organelles which generate specialized retroviruses which
> are continually released into the biosphere. These retroviruses come
> in several sorts: There are correctors which correct minor genetic
> errors in the target population; there are modifiers which add new
> genetic material to the target population; and there are killers which
> eliminate organisms which deviate too far from the master plan.
This is similar to what Michael Kanaly did in _The Virus
Clans_, and I must say I didn't find the bilogy in that at all
convincing, either. Plus, I hated how the focus character
just vanished into a footnote before the story ended. The
overall effect was to have me asking why I'd endured the
piece, and what story did Kanaly think he was telling.
Richard Harter
<Rob...@shavian.fsnet.co.uk> wrote:
>
>Richard Harter <c...@tiac.net> wrote
>> > at 10:40 AM, Steve Charlton <st...@nospam.freeserve.co.uk> said:
>> >
>> >>Both H.Sap and Pak are decended from Tnuctipun created food yeast. Who
>> >>knows what tricks the Tnuctipun may have played on the food yeast's
>> >>genetic code?
>>
>> No, no, no, that's not how it was done. What they did was create the
>> Mother Amoeba. The Mother Amoeba has a very secure genome; it also
>> has special organelles which generate specialized retroviruses which
>> are continually released into the biosphere. These retroviruses come
>> in several sorts: There are correctors which correct minor genetic
>> errors in the target population; there are modifiers which add new
>> genetic material to the target population; and there are killers which
>> eliminate organisms which deviate too far from the master plan.
>>
>> Earth and the Pak world got the same Mother Amoeba; on Earth, however,
>> the Mother Amoeba died about some millions of years ago which is why
>> the Tree of Life virus never showed up on time.
>
>Why would the Tnuctipun want to produce Pak? The Pak would not
>serve them willingly, they would be rivals. It might be that the Pak are
>the Tnuctipin recreated, but Kzanol should have noticed if humans
>looked familiar.
Kzanol wasn't too swift; I wouldn't count on him noticing anything.
I surmise, however, that the Pak are missing some programming. OTOH
how do we know that the Pak wouldn't server the Tnuctipun? Maybe
they have an obedience circuit that never cut in because they never
met any Tnucipun.
>A Tnuctipun-Pak conflict would be interesting to watch, from a
>safe distance. We don't know what really caused the core explosion
>either.
True.
>The Mother Amoeba is one improbability too many for me.
>It would have to containat a minimum the entire functional
>human genetic code, code for large parts of the ecosystem
>(to ensure the food that evolves is edible) and regulatory genes
>that can tell exactly what stage evolution has reached. It would be
>too vulnerable to genetic damage.
Oh come now. The Mother Amoeba is big. The human genome fits quite
nicely inside the nucleus of a human cell. Ye typical speciman of
homer sap contains some trillions of cells. The Mother Amoeba is
a blob of about human size. It has encysted within it trillions of
genomes, waiting for use. There are, BTW, single celled organisms
larger than human beings (certain species of plants) with numerous
nuclei so don't jump on that one. Genetic damage is mostly a matter
of tradeoffs - biological error reduction can be made arbitrarily
small but the cost is too high for replicating organisms. It's
cheaper to accept an error rate.
Justin Bacon
>I said genetic engineering because you can't do artificial selection on
>one sex only. For obvious reasons.
Possibility: The genes for intelligence are found on the gender-dependent
(equivalent of the "y") chromosome for kzin.
Justin Bacon
tr...@prairie.lakes.com
Brendan Macmillan
: Long ago, someone said "give me seven lines written by the best of men,
: and I will find there something with which to hang him."
By Goddamn, you're right! best of "men"! hang "him"!!
gromgorru
Jim Lovejoy (ji...@ix.netcom.com) wrote:
> gromgorru wrote:
>> Del Cotter wrote in message ...
>>
>>>
>>>So, that's one dumb-male species, one dumb-female species, and one
>>>equally-smart species. It looks to me as if Niven was playing with
>>>various possibilities. What a sexist pig, eh?
>>
>>Pak breeders are presentient, whereas protectors are supersentient.
>>Clearly an Ageist. :-)
>Nah. Since they only become supersentient by taking "drugs". He his
>clearly a, a -- uh help me out here. Pothead doesn't work, nor does
>drug pusher, the best I can think or is "drug culture glorifier", but
>clumsy is an understatement for the phrase.
The tree of live is natchural!!!
Niall McAuley
>There's all kinds of SF from 30 years ago where you can point and criticize
>the science. It's boring.
The science in _Protector is and always was much, much worse than the
orbital physics howler in _Ringworld_ which earned Niven so much abuse.
But it is girly biology not manly Physics, so he doesn't have to retcon it.
--
Niall [real address endsin se, not es]
J. Moreno
> Del Cotter <d...@branta.demon.co.uk> writes:
>
> >I said genetic engineering because you can't do artificial selection on
> >one sex only. For obvious reasons.
>
> Possibility: The genes for intelligence are found on the gender-dependent
> (equivalent of the "y") chromosome for kzin.
Given the situation as stated in the books -- the kzin have done genetic
engineering so that there is a recessive on the X that inhibits
intelligence.
(Remember, females were intelligent at one time).
--
John Moreno
John F Carr
Matt Hickman <hem...@attglobal.net> wrote:
>I was in high school at the time and even
>then I knew the idea of Humans originating from an
>alien species was nonsense. [...]
>
>[...] And he should have known better -- and his editor Fred Pohl
>should not have let him get away with it without at least
>some more plausible hand-waving than 'all life everywhere
>originated from Slaver food yeast.'
That wasn't all the hand waving. There was also a brief exchange
in _Protector_ that went like:
"There is substantial evidence that humans evolved on Earth."
"I know. I have some ideas about that."
I'd like to see a return to Known Space for a plausible explanation
of the Pak, preferably in the style of Down In Flames. (Maybe the
puppeteers created the Pak as part of their program to help humans;
that would explain why the Hindmost survived in Ringworld Engineers.)
--
John Carr (j...@mit.edu)
Captain Button
[ snip ]
> Clarissa MacDougal and Virgilia Samms, both from the works of a writer
> who isn't generally held up as a model of ground-breaking gender
> relations in fiction.
> Heinlein in the forties and fifties had bunches of strong female
> characters--not usually the lead, and he had annoying numbers of
> dippy, stereotypical females as minor characters, too, but he had
> strong female characters. H. Beam Piper had Princess Rylla in the Lord
> Kalvan stories.
Re: Piper
Sylvia Jacquemont (sp?) in _The Cosmic Computer_. And it was either
there or in aother one of his SF novels that the male protagonist
reflected that there were plenty of women who could do technical
work of the type in question at that point in the book.
And the woman in _Uller Uprising_ who gets drafted as the general's
adjutant in the emergency, and does a damn fine job of it.
> That's with minimal thought and no effort. There weren't many female
> leads being written by male sf writers prior to the 1970s, but there
> were strong female characters.
--
[ but...@io.com ]"DOGBERRY: Marry, sir, they have committed false report;
moreover, they have spoken untruths; secondarily, they are slanders; sixth
and lastly, they have belied a lady; thirdly, they have verified unjust
things; and, to conclude, they are lying knaves." Shakespeare - _Much Ado.._
Mark Brown
called (oddly enough) "MEDEA: Harlan's World".
The six-legged beasties are called (and I am not joking), "fuxes".
mark
Brendan Macmillan wrote:
>
> Charles T. Biggs <cbi...@hsonline.net> wrote:
> : Brendan Macmillan wrote in message
>
> :>: In another story, an ignorant woman
> :>:>tourist almost wrecks an entire colony
> :> "FLARE TIME"
>
> : Thanks for the answer. Now for part two of the question:
> Sorry, it was meant to link the two quoted posts. I guess two words is
> just a bit too concise.
>
> : is this the story Voyl was referring to?
> Yup. It's the only Niven story anywhere close. Probably because, uh,
> it's the only one with a female protagonist.
>
> : (It's been a good while since I've read this
> : story and I have totally forgotten who wrote it and where I first read it.)
> I've seen it in the collection "Limits" (published by Orbit) - which had
> a picture of the sometime-six legged beasties on the front, despite the
> title "Limits" being of an entirely different story in the collection.
>
> I also saw it in "N-Space", that the original poster read - which is the
> other reason why I'm so sure.
>
> Brendan
> --
> Brendan Macmillan
> br...@csse.monash.edu.au +61 (3) 9587 2117 tel: +61 (3) 9905 5194
> Email is checked daily voice mail Phone is rarely attended
> In an Austrian hotel catering to skiers: Not to perambulate the
> corriders during the hours of repose in the boots of ascension.
--
------------This message brought to you via PowerPC and Lotus Notes-------------
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IBM RS/6000 AIX System Architecture 512.838.3926 T/L678.3926
IBM Corporation, Austin, Texas
Richard Treitel
>Although I haven't read everything Niven's published, the human female
>characters of his that I have encountered all seem to be nothing more than
>romance interests for the protagonists or something equally lame.
I agree with you for the most part, but in _The Integral Trees_ there
are some women who pack a little more punch. OTGH if I were a woman I
don't know as I'd be very fond of Niven as a writer. (As a person, he's
quite charming.)
-- Richard
------
I don't read Usenet as regularly as I used to. Please be patient.
See also http://www.sirius.com/~treitel/Mark/index.html
++ remove foodstuffs from address before replying ++
wdg...@home.com
> Heh. I'm a big fan of James Schmitz, and he wrote little but
> strong female characters as his main leads. And this was in
> the 50's.
I'm racking my brain right now (give it another turn!) trying to
recall if Schmitz ever wrote a story with a male lead.
--
Ward Griffiths wdg...@home.com http://members.home.net/wdg3rd/
"It is not merely that I dislike, distrust and disbelieve anyone who
seeks political office. I would extend privacy rights even to
politicians were it not for two countervailing circumstances. First,
they themselves violate privacy rights wholesale. They regulate
virtually everything that peaceful people can do behind closed doors,
from taking drugs to having sex. It is elitist hypocrisy for them to
demand the privacy rights that they routinely deny to ordinary people.
If a politician wishes me to respect his personal life, then he needs
to respect mine." Wendy McElroy
Richard Lamb
Elisabeth Carey
>
> Did you read King David's Spaceship?
By Jerry Pournelle? Sure. What's it got to do with the question of
whether or not Niven has any strong women characters, or whether that
Means Anything?
Lis Carey