From: Michael S. Lorrey (retroman@turbont.net)
Date: Wed Oct 04 2000 - 11:01:34 MDT
Christian Weisgerber wrote:
>
> [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?
The easiest reason in the world: because the bad guys would already be doing
it...
I just read _Forests of the Night_, which I am guessing is the second of the
Moreau novels. I have not been able to find any of his other novels in bookshops
round here, but I could order them I suppose. What is the title of the other
one? I've already read Swann's _Hostile Takeover_ trilogy, which occurs in the
same universe, a hundred or two years later.
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