John Barnes' The Merchants of Souls, part one

"The whole problem with the artistic project of creating a better human future is that our medium has to be human beings, and they are the most plastic and the most rigid medium there is." ---Dji

There is always a danger in looking into voids in science fiction: drawing inferrences from technologies that are not discussed in the context of the book. But in this case, the book appears dance so carefully around the topic that one really has to wonder.

The topic, in this case, is human genetic engineering. Not only does there not seem to be any in the Thousand Cultures future, but the very concept seems almost literally unthinkable. And John Barnes appears to be deliberately making the reader think about it even while his narrator cannot.

Consider: we have, in a very early scene, uplifted seals that are capable of mimicing complex physical activity. We have, long established in the series, a process of cloning human beings with somewhat accelerated growth that implies a rather healthy understanding of the human genome, as well as the fields related to the neuroscience behind the psyphix. We have vastly intelligenct AIs able to solve technical problems at the drop of the hat, and to go beyond and develop new science and solutions.

And yet: Dji's culture, devoted to creating a genetically pure form of humanity, does all of its work through eugenics rather than doing any DNA editing. And yet: Laprada is born with a chemically (which is to say, genetically) based form of depression: they're not even doing pre-conception genetic screening. And when they start the new clone body, the idea of fixing the broken gene doesn't even get thrown up to get knocked down.

(Incidentally, I've seen some blurb-like text that claimed that The Armies of Memory is going to be the last in the series. I certainly hope that it's as inaccurate as blurb-like text usually is and we are going to see A Far Cry eventually. At the least. Because we still have to see the aliens and the cultures of Addams, about which more speculation in part two.)