[TML] Fictional Mileaux [SEC=UNOFFICIAL]

[Richard Aiken]

On 9/5/07, shadow at shadowgard.com <shadow at shadowgard.com> wrote:
>
> On 5 Sep 2007 at 14:07, Richard Aiken wrote:
> > Make something intelligent, train it to kill . . . then tell it it's an
> > expendable slave soldier.  And you're surprised if it successfully
> rebels?
>
> Slave armies *have* been successfully used in the past. Humans are
> weird that way. A lot more of our behavior is cultural than most
> folks believe.


Ah yes.  Janissaries.  But note the "expendable."  It's one thing to fight
and die for paternal masters who care about you (particularly if you
basically rule the country for them, as the Janissaries did for their
master).  It's quite another to fight and die for masters who literally
treat you like nothing more than a trained animal.

So you could likely make such a uplifted army work *if* you had a
> good enough handle on psychology and sociology. Then again, if you
> are that good, why do you need an army against members of your own
> species? :-)


Exactly.  :-)

> Droyne will be humans whose weird hormonal systems only allow individuals
> to
> > fully mature in response to stimuli received during the coyn ceremony.
>
> Ah. Naked mole rat biology applied to humans.


Yep.  IMTU, some Ancients - actually time-travelling humans -
were/are/will-be weird folk.  BTW, the time-travelling works without causing
parallel universes because Earth doesn't discover anything about what's
going on until it's lost stargates re-open in 2117 CE.  Of course, they
weren't lost to the Ancients.  That point in time is when they get re-opened
by a surviving faction of the Ancients who want to let the Solomani in on
what's happening in the rest of the 'Verse.

BTW, don't discount how alien a group that's fully human biologically
> can get. Some of C. J. Cherryh's stuff touches on this. And Donald
> Kingsbury's "Courtship Rite" is a classic of really alien humans.


Thanks for the references.  :-)

And anthropologists have described some pretty weird human cultures.


Yep.  What's that bush culture that's killing itself by stealing food from
it's children?

-- 
Richard Aiken

"Never insult anyone by accident."  Robert A. Heinlein