From archive (archive)
Subject: Gryphon
From: eric@snark.uu.net (Eric S. Raymond)
Date: 2 Feb 90 16:41:17 GMT



In <1043@mindlink.UUCP> Crawford Kilian wrote:
>           Well, for what it's worth I've published 9 SF novels
> since 1978, among them Icequake, Empire of Time, Gryphon, Lifter,
> Brother Jonathan, Rogue Emperor and Fall of the Republic.

I give Gryphon a postive "short take" in an upcoming Raymond's Reviews. I think
you did a commendable job of imagining what a post-nanotechnology society might
be like, but I found your premise that human beings had gene-altered themselves
into solitaries implausible (and, it seems to me, unnecessary to the conflict
you were setting up). Seems to me more likely that "estates" would house groups
of from family up to preindustrial-village size.

Care to comment on your motivations or reasoning?
-- 
      Eric S. Raymond = eric@snark.uu.net    (mad mastermind of TMN-Netnews)

From archive (archive)
Subject: Re: Gryphon
From: a710@mindlink.UUCP (Crawford Kilian)
Organization: MIND LINK! - British Columbia, Canada
Date: 2 Feb 90 17:18:36 GMT



Thanks for your kind comments.  I don't think I had my people gene-altered into
solitaries; they simply had no particular use for social behavior and values,
since they had no need for one another.  I was just extrapolating current
trends--where, for example, the nuclear family has largely broken up because
it's possible to rear children without the traditional male-female bonded pair
(never mind the extended family, which survives in North America only among
some immigrant groups not yet fully assimilated).  So the "rewiring" of Alex
and the others through the molmac cocktails isn't so much genetic engineering
as the re-starting of long-atrophied impulses.  Am I making any sense?  Hope
so.
In a larger sense I was trying to deal with some of the stalest cliches in the
business and to breathe something like life back into them: space war, alien
conquest of Earth, interstellar empires.  It was hard to keep a straight face,
but the story did turn out to be fun to write.