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MannyRayner

Manny Rayner's book reviews

I love reviewing books - have been doing it at Goodreads, but considering moving here.

Currently reading

The Greatest Show On Earth: The Evidence For Evolution
Richard Dawkins
R in Action
Robert Kabacoff
Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies
Douglas R. Hofstadter
McGee on Food and Cooking: An Encyclopedia of Kitchen Science, History and Culture
Harold McGee
Epistemic Dimensions of Personhood
Simon Evnine
Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning (Information Science and Statistics)
Christopher M. Bishop
Relativity, Thermodynamics and Cosmology
Richard C. Tolman
The Cambridge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition
Julia Herschensohn, Martha Young-Scholten

The Dragon Masters

The Dragon Masters - Jack Vance I am slowly making my way through McGee's encyclopedic On Food and Cooking, which is teaching me all sorts of fascinating and surprising things. One theme that stands out is how recent many fruits and vegetables are: for example, rutabagas (swedes), broccoli, cauliflower and strawberries were all created during the last few hundred years. Similarly, all our domestic animals have been bred for properties that make them very different from their wild ancestors.

After a while, I started wondering why human beings are so similar to each other. Okay, some of us are a bit bigger or a bit smaller than average, or may have skin or hair that's a slightly different color. But when you compare to the range of diversity you'll see in e.g. cats, dogs or horses, we're astonishingly uniform. Why haven't long-lived empires (Egypt, Rome, China, Japan...) created specialised human breeds? Was there insufficient time? Did the rulers have ethical objections? Or is it people's intrinsically exogamous nature - our deep-rooted habit of thinking that sexual partners who look different are by that token exciting and attractive?

There aren't even many science-fictional explorations of the idea. This is one of the few I can think of, and it isn't very good; I agree with the other disappointed reviewers. I'm mystified.
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I'm still wondering why there weren't programs to create special breeds of people. Over dinner with notgettingenough, I speculated about what plans I might have had if I'd been a ruthless Chinese emperor a couple of thousand years ago. Not didn't seem very interested: probably just as well, since now we won't need to go through the bloody power struggle to determine who ends up controlling the Jade Throne. Anyway, here are the breeds I thought I'd prioritise.

- Soldiers. I'd breed them for strength, stamina, ferocity and obedience to authority.

- Concubines. What's an Emperor without a couple of hundred concubines? I'd want them to be as hot as possible. That's pretty much the whole set of requirements in fact.

- Workers. Big, tough, healthy people, but without any of the soldiers' ferocity.

- Mothers. Someone needs to raise all the children. I don't think soldiers or concubines would have good parenting skills. I'd breed mothers for stamina, reliability, empathy and an innate ability to bake good cookies.

- Smart people. I'm a bit nervous about this, because smart people are dangerous and hard to control, but if I don't have a few poets, calligraphers and artists I'll die of boredom. I can't spend all my time with my concubines, and if I feel like relaxing some evening with a new four-act verse drama then I damn well need someone to write it. Also, the army requires good generals to tell the soldiers what to do.

Well, that's my short-list. What's yours?