From: lynnmcguire5@gmail.com
On 11/3/2025 12:57 PM, Ted Nolan wrote:
> In article <10easo1$ht2$1@usenet.csail.mit.edu>,
> Garrett Wollman wrote:
>> In article <10eaq8r$dh7$1@reader2.panix.com>,
>> James Nicoll wrote:
>>> Five Ways Science Fiction Can Expand Beyond Homo sapiens
>>>
>>> Modern humans are fine, but what if we had a bit more variety in
>>> our stories?
>>>
>>> https://reactormag.com/five-ways-science-fiction-can-expand-
eyond-homo-sapiens/
>>
>> The newsgroup has been way too quiet lately! Let's have some
>> discussion.
>>
>> 1) In Julian May's "Saga of Pliocene Exile", a population of exiles
>>from a far-away galaxy shows up on Pliocene earth in the proto-Rhone
>> Valley. Having similar reproductive biology to the extant hominins,
>> and not being as successful at carrying their own babies to term, they
>> experiment with using the local Ramapithecus (a now-obsolete taxon) as
>> surrogate mothers. Much to their surprise and joy, modern-human time
>> travelers start passing through a one-way time-gate into their
>> territory and they are somehow genetically compatible with the aliens
>> and able to engender fertile hybrids. Since they lack metapsychic
>> powers (which are screened out by the operators of the time-gate) they
>> are easily enslaved; those with special skills are integrated into the
>> political structure... and one of them manages to make himself High
>> King in the aftermath of the Zanclean Flood. It is implied that this
>> hybrid population survives until the arrival of modern humanity, and
>> (a) is the source of the genes that will lead to set metapsychic
>> powers arising among 20th-century humans, and (b) are the source of
>> the legendary heroes of Irish mythology who IRL May based the
>> characters on.
>>
>> 2) In Graydon Saunders' (late of this newsgroup) Commonweal, one of
>> the things dark-lord sorcerers seem to have loved doing over a hundred
>> thousand years was invent people. Many are humanoid, indeed many are
>> derived from human stock (pulled out of an alternate past after
>> humanity exterminated itself in an enormous global war). Some others
>> are unicorns (seven independently created species), kelpies, and other
>> kinds of Dangerous Sapient Creatures we don't see in the five books
>> published thus far. The humanoids generally have similar anatomy (and
>> at least some of them are seen to have sex) but are reproductively
>> isolated.
>>
>> 3) In Elf Sternberg's (late of this newsgroup) extended porny
>> interstellar soap opera, the Journal Entries, the journaller of the
>> title is a very horny libertarian bisexual geneticist with a fur
>> fetish, and likes creating new species that he will later figure out
>> how to have sex with. In addition, there are also humanoid species
>> elsewhere in the galaxy that he encounters and at times rescues from
>> imminent social collapse. (Sometimes the rescue is done
>> retroactively, reconstructing a species from the genetic and cultural
>> material they have left behind.) Terran humans followed their own
>> path to immortality which made them sterile, so any new humans are
>> grown in vats, along with a couple of species they invent but don't
>> really care much for. Away from Terra, interspecies relationships are
>> common, as is xenoparenting (which has its own scientific journal);
>> some species are biologically capable of being surrogates for other
>> species, which is aided by 12 of the species having had the same
>> designer and been scaffolded on the same Terran evolutionary history.
>>
>
> Off the top of my head we have a number of post or non human humanish species
> in fairly well known SF:
>
> Slans
> Baldies
> Iterloo
> Underpeople
> Draka
> Sime
> Children Of The Lens
> Eloi/Morlocks
> The Last Men
I forgot about the the Draka. They were amazing and incredibly cold
hearted.
Lynn
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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