Moreaus?

From: Christian Weisgerber (naddy@mips.inka.de)
Date: Tue Oct 03 2000 - 16:35:09 MDT


[Non-member submission]

I finished S. Andrew Swann's third Moreau novel _Specters of the
Dawn_ yesterday, which got me a bit thinking. If you didn't guess,
a "moreau" is a genetically engineered sapient animal. The term
and the basic idea is of course lifted wholesale from H.G. Well's
_The Island of Dr. Moreau_. In Swann's universe, moreaus were
created as workers and later soldiers, and eventually end up as a
ghettoized underclass in his U.S. American setting.

Anyway, ignoring any moral posturing for the moment, I've been
wondering whether there would be any real world incentives to create
moreaus or, to use a term and a similar idea from David Brin's
novels, "uplift" terrestrial animal species to human-level
intelligence?

As nifty as these ideas are for a novel, assuming we could, why
would we possibly want to do something like this?

--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber                          naddy@mips.inka.de 


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