My Base Pair, Sam J Miller
Aug. 3rd, 2018 06:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethStill reading Analog, just read something... interesting.
there is A Lot going on in this short.
So, it's about children of celebrities, but the way it explains the science they're never just called children of celebrities? Because the SF bit is someone figured out how to make sperm from celebrity DNA without the pesky cooperation and permission parts of it, which is layers of creepy, but a lot of people in the story used the 'hacksperm' and made children with it. But they're not called that? They're called clones, and demigenotypically identical individuals, demigenotypical duplicates, and that's... weird. I mean here it has all the usual SF rhetoric about clones and 'dupes' and 'their status as legally distinct persons was not yet firmly established' but, you know, they share half their DNA with a celebrity through sperm donation, they're just regular people with some unethical sourcing in their conception.
And I think the story knows that, where it says if you get the cheap stuff you might get "a child no more resembling its original than any child would look like one parent". But that's one sentence out of the whole story? Otherwise it uses all this cloning rhetoric about them and reckons people know them on sight and makes up words for them. But the story is about treating people as things, as "Believing someone is more than human is not so different from believing someone is less than human. Both dehumanize." So the point of view character has his friend the half-celebrity up on a pedestal, and everyone who used the sperm to make a child had celebrities up on pedestals, and it's a really weird way to treat other humans.
... I was reading someone on facebook trying to establish boundaries and getting pushback from his fans, and saying how most people understand they don't know each other but there's always a few who just think they've got a special connection, and it just sounded exhausting. And he's someone I follow because he's successfully dealing with his mental health stuff, so to have this celebrity stuff on top seems... that seems awkward.
But it's also, people on social media nowadays, it's possible to form friendships and be actually honestly close, but it's also possible to lurk and be weird about it. I mean, I seldom comment, and I have been reading some of the same people for... probably decades now? And that's kind of weird! Like, mini celebrity one sided stuff. Sometimes I worry none of them like me back. More times I worry that my read only approach is socially inappropriate even if they did grant access. It's awkward.
So how we treat celebrities is like relevant and important stuff here.
But this DNA stuff, I think the story knows it is being weird about it, I think it's clear they're just children the sperm donors didn't have a choice about making... but almost none of the language from the point of view guy supports that.
Also there's one paragraph about how they can tweak the DNA to fix teeth and make it so the appearance of the celebrity is expressed with no contribution from the mother. And that's a much higher level of biotech than anything else in the story. I mean, copying DNA is one thing, that's kind of it's reason for being, but making it so sperm do all the deciding on appearance is entirely another. And it doesn't match how any character is described? They're all described by their difference from their 'original'. ... parents are not an original. But if they all look different then they're... not duplicates?
So I think the story is about how the point of view guy and his society decided to be really strange about celebrities and their kids and put them in a whole different category of human. But I'm just unsure enough about what the author meant to do with the science that I'm left kind of ??? ?? ? about it. Even though morally it would make no difference if the tech did what it says and duplicates dna identically, you'd still need to treat people right.
Also it skips past the really important genetic stuff and focuses on appearance. Like, it mentions jolies, and uses the no capital letter description despite the fact they're like genetically Jolies, family of, just unauthorised in a way that should really matter in some ways and not in others. So that hints people know they're just relatives but have made new rules. All the 'clone' kids only mention the uncapitalised surnames, same way.
But jolie specifically - Angelina Jolie? Got some serious surgery done because of a genetic tendency in her family. Searching Angelina Jolie genetics gets a lot of answers. Very high risk of cancer. If a lot of people make Jolie children simply because she's pretty, and the tech is only there to make copies of her genes? The 'jolies' are going to have the same inherited risk. Which is where a lot of story should live. People concentrating on the superficial and ignoring the actual lived experience of the celebrities.
But that doesn't get mentioned in so much as one line. Her famous appearance is mentioned, her... life isn't.
Are we expected to be able to fill in the blanks or is the author not paying attention? I couldn't tell, so it's nagging me.
But also, if that one paragraph about gene expression is more what the whole story is about, they can maybe get the appearance without the everything else. Which is also story.
But the description of how 'hacksperm' are made is just, patch someone's testicles to make sperm as if they were a celebrity, gender controlled to match pirated parent. I was reading some really interesting science fact stuff about epigenetics and the epididimus that suggested it would in fact matter which body the testicles were in even after they were reprogrammed because the gene expression stuff might get tweaked on the way out. Didn't entirely understand it, seems to be science of the interesting questions phase rather than the exciting answers one. But has relevance to the science fiction.
And also makes me wonder, what guy would patch his balls to make sperm that was nothing to do with him? That seems like an interesting character, or set of characters. Like, lots of people have donor kids, why would those particular people want to patch themselves that way? How many were just trying to be parents without passing something on?
Depicting the whole thing as criminal identity theft and entirely about celebrities is where the focus of the story is at but there's interesting SF around the edges.
The story is about a guy who has an unrequited crush on a 'cruise' kid and expresses it as 'you could be in pictures'. And gets punched and socially blocked for it. So he spends years looking for his crush again and when he finds him he's living with another 'cruise' and the point of view guy reckons they're in love, but by this point he's been projecting about every other damn thing and only sometimes catching himself at it, so who even knows? Which is an interesting way to write it. So it's about this guy thinking the best thing he can say to his friend is something like how much like his unwilling sperm donor 'dad' he could be, which, you know, goes poorly.
Also the guy he has a crush on has a diagnosis of schizophrenia since he was a kid. But that's all. There's no mention of treatment or anything. No sense of a future. He's just crazy now and forever.
... not okay.
Also the 'symptoms' are him smashing things and sometimes people. Which again, no.
Mental health representation lacking.
Even though it's like half a hint at an interesting layer of how people react psychologically to pressure to be someone, to being treated as Other. It's not the right word or a helpful way.
But what the layers of the story add up to is how people can treat each other really terribly when they think they know the whole story about another person on sight, when they sit in their heads staring at their memories and fantasies and don't pay attention to the actual human being right there, when they make up categories of not person and pity hate worship them.
I think the point of view character is a terrible person and that's why there's messy gaps in the sense. It's all what he believes.
He's in forensics, law enforcement, specifically having a career about these celebrity offspring, and he uses that to stalk the guy he had a crush on, tries to use the police to get his phone number and, like, basic attention.
And then the end of the story just gives him the number?
And it's like he's learned nothing.
So I don't know.
There is a lot to unpack here, and it's about how people see and don't see each other.
And I don't think I even mentioned the racial level, which is definitely there but not like summarised anywhere. The point of view guy is white and the 'dupe' he's talking to points out that means he can wander around getting drunk where it would get others in legal difficulties. 'Dupes' get much worse treatment from law enforcement. And the one he talks to is 'darker' than the one he has a crush on. Who renames himself Kenji. But both are 'unmistakably' visually 'cruises'. So there's just... there's a lot going on there. Mixed race kids of white celebrities? That's a whole world of story itself.
And the history of 'hacksperm' in the story mentions the first 'case' was someone claiming child support for a child they'd made with pirated sperm, and a lot of cases went by like that because the genetics proved out even when the father claimed he'd never met the mother, but then one really religious one got annoyed with money and proved the biotech involved. But it mentions he did it by hacking her email and finding the lab privately and paying people to testify, so that's actually got a lot of room to be a different story where the wrongdoing wasn't originally hers. And then it's like a hundred percent of the laws make the kids a crime? The story says they're not eligible for food stamps in some states. It never says there's other states where their unwilling gene donors are still held to be parents. Don't humans usually decide all the things somewhere? These are just kids. Why would the law try and push towards abandoning them?
Also it says 'hacksperm' were used by lesbians who wanted kids. But there are jolies, there are celebrity kids made of sperm with DNA from female celebrities. So, the tech is there to just... make a two mother baby? Why wouldn't they do that? And okay, the story isn't about the ones who would do that. But it's making me think.
Also it reckons no female star has a 'troublesome' Y chromosome to worry about getting the incorrect gender of child, and that... that's not... well that's not the point of this story but um.
So the story is about how people decided to treat a whole new section of society horribly, and it's interesting because it makes it plausible, and has stuff to say about celebrity culture.
But it doesn't have a ray of light, a possibility for an alternative. There's no mention of people being treated well, of being, you know, kids. I keep on thinking of how Cordelia Vorkosigan would meet these people, her being a celebrity on her world, and how she'd just be... joyous and greedy for them, for such a huge family, but also feel bad about each and every one of them she hadn't done her best by. And there's no trace of that in this story, the idea that some of these kids would be wanted.
There's just a weirdly high rate of kids put up for adoption, considering the sperm to make them was expensive in the first place, and a mention in passing of a lot of institutionalised crazy people being dupes.
And then it's like, which makes more sense, everyone reacting that way, or society coming up with a new explanation for a set of people it doesn't like? They didn't gene test the guy's crush to decide he's a cruise, they looked at photos. How many people look a little bit like a celebrity really?
And it's interesting, but depressing, and incomplete in ways that make me ??? but are probably because the point of view guy is just the biggest jerk and doesn't hardly know it. But only probably.
So there's a lot going on in there.
Interesting stuff.
But stuff that makes me want to unravel it and write things kinder right away.
there is A Lot going on in this short.
So, it's about children of celebrities, but the way it explains the science they're never just called children of celebrities? Because the SF bit is someone figured out how to make sperm from celebrity DNA without the pesky cooperation and permission parts of it, which is layers of creepy, but a lot of people in the story used the 'hacksperm' and made children with it. But they're not called that? They're called clones, and demigenotypically identical individuals, demigenotypical duplicates, and that's... weird. I mean here it has all the usual SF rhetoric about clones and 'dupes' and 'their status as legally distinct persons was not yet firmly established' but, you know, they share half their DNA with a celebrity through sperm donation, they're just regular people with some unethical sourcing in their conception.
And I think the story knows that, where it says if you get the cheap stuff you might get "a child no more resembling its original than any child would look like one parent". But that's one sentence out of the whole story? Otherwise it uses all this cloning rhetoric about them and reckons people know them on sight and makes up words for them. But the story is about treating people as things, as "Believing someone is more than human is not so different from believing someone is less than human. Both dehumanize." So the point of view character has his friend the half-celebrity up on a pedestal, and everyone who used the sperm to make a child had celebrities up on pedestals, and it's a really weird way to treat other humans.
... I was reading someone on facebook trying to establish boundaries and getting pushback from his fans, and saying how most people understand they don't know each other but there's always a few who just think they've got a special connection, and it just sounded exhausting. And he's someone I follow because he's successfully dealing with his mental health stuff, so to have this celebrity stuff on top seems... that seems awkward.
But it's also, people on social media nowadays, it's possible to form friendships and be actually honestly close, but it's also possible to lurk and be weird about it. I mean, I seldom comment, and I have been reading some of the same people for... probably decades now? And that's kind of weird! Like, mini celebrity one sided stuff. Sometimes I worry none of them like me back. More times I worry that my read only approach is socially inappropriate even if they did grant access. It's awkward.
So how we treat celebrities is like relevant and important stuff here.
But this DNA stuff, I think the story knows it is being weird about it, I think it's clear they're just children the sperm donors didn't have a choice about making... but almost none of the language from the point of view guy supports that.
Also there's one paragraph about how they can tweak the DNA to fix teeth and make it so the appearance of the celebrity is expressed with no contribution from the mother. And that's a much higher level of biotech than anything else in the story. I mean, copying DNA is one thing, that's kind of it's reason for being, but making it so sperm do all the deciding on appearance is entirely another. And it doesn't match how any character is described? They're all described by their difference from their 'original'. ... parents are not an original. But if they all look different then they're... not duplicates?
So I think the story is about how the point of view guy and his society decided to be really strange about celebrities and their kids and put them in a whole different category of human. But I'm just unsure enough about what the author meant to do with the science that I'm left kind of ??? ?? ? about it. Even though morally it would make no difference if the tech did what it says and duplicates dna identically, you'd still need to treat people right.
Also it skips past the really important genetic stuff and focuses on appearance. Like, it mentions jolies, and uses the no capital letter description despite the fact they're like genetically Jolies, family of, just unauthorised in a way that should really matter in some ways and not in others. So that hints people know they're just relatives but have made new rules. All the 'clone' kids only mention the uncapitalised surnames, same way.
But jolie specifically - Angelina Jolie? Got some serious surgery done because of a genetic tendency in her family. Searching Angelina Jolie genetics gets a lot of answers. Very high risk of cancer. If a lot of people make Jolie children simply because she's pretty, and the tech is only there to make copies of her genes? The 'jolies' are going to have the same inherited risk. Which is where a lot of story should live. People concentrating on the superficial and ignoring the actual lived experience of the celebrities.
But that doesn't get mentioned in so much as one line. Her famous appearance is mentioned, her... life isn't.
Are we expected to be able to fill in the blanks or is the author not paying attention? I couldn't tell, so it's nagging me.
But also, if that one paragraph about gene expression is more what the whole story is about, they can maybe get the appearance without the everything else. Which is also story.
But the description of how 'hacksperm' are made is just, patch someone's testicles to make sperm as if they were a celebrity, gender controlled to match pirated parent. I was reading some really interesting science fact stuff about epigenetics and the epididimus that suggested it would in fact matter which body the testicles were in even after they were reprogrammed because the gene expression stuff might get tweaked on the way out. Didn't entirely understand it, seems to be science of the interesting questions phase rather than the exciting answers one. But has relevance to the science fiction.
And also makes me wonder, what guy would patch his balls to make sperm that was nothing to do with him? That seems like an interesting character, or set of characters. Like, lots of people have donor kids, why would those particular people want to patch themselves that way? How many were just trying to be parents without passing something on?
Depicting the whole thing as criminal identity theft and entirely about celebrities is where the focus of the story is at but there's interesting SF around the edges.
The story is about a guy who has an unrequited crush on a 'cruise' kid and expresses it as 'you could be in pictures'. And gets punched and socially blocked for it. So he spends years looking for his crush again and when he finds him he's living with another 'cruise' and the point of view guy reckons they're in love, but by this point he's been projecting about every other damn thing and only sometimes catching himself at it, so who even knows? Which is an interesting way to write it. So it's about this guy thinking the best thing he can say to his friend is something like how much like his unwilling sperm donor 'dad' he could be, which, you know, goes poorly.
Also the guy he has a crush on has a diagnosis of schizophrenia since he was a kid. But that's all. There's no mention of treatment or anything. No sense of a future. He's just crazy now and forever.
... not okay.
Also the 'symptoms' are him smashing things and sometimes people. Which again, no.
Mental health representation lacking.
Even though it's like half a hint at an interesting layer of how people react psychologically to pressure to be someone, to being treated as Other. It's not the right word or a helpful way.
But what the layers of the story add up to is how people can treat each other really terribly when they think they know the whole story about another person on sight, when they sit in their heads staring at their memories and fantasies and don't pay attention to the actual human being right there, when they make up categories of not person and pity hate worship them.
I think the point of view character is a terrible person and that's why there's messy gaps in the sense. It's all what he believes.
He's in forensics, law enforcement, specifically having a career about these celebrity offspring, and he uses that to stalk the guy he had a crush on, tries to use the police to get his phone number and, like, basic attention.
And then the end of the story just gives him the number?
And it's like he's learned nothing.
So I don't know.
There is a lot to unpack here, and it's about how people see and don't see each other.
And I don't think I even mentioned the racial level, which is definitely there but not like summarised anywhere. The point of view guy is white and the 'dupe' he's talking to points out that means he can wander around getting drunk where it would get others in legal difficulties. 'Dupes' get much worse treatment from law enforcement. And the one he talks to is 'darker' than the one he has a crush on. Who renames himself Kenji. But both are 'unmistakably' visually 'cruises'. So there's just... there's a lot going on there. Mixed race kids of white celebrities? That's a whole world of story itself.
And the history of 'hacksperm' in the story mentions the first 'case' was someone claiming child support for a child they'd made with pirated sperm, and a lot of cases went by like that because the genetics proved out even when the father claimed he'd never met the mother, but then one really religious one got annoyed with money and proved the biotech involved. But it mentions he did it by hacking her email and finding the lab privately and paying people to testify, so that's actually got a lot of room to be a different story where the wrongdoing wasn't originally hers. And then it's like a hundred percent of the laws make the kids a crime? The story says they're not eligible for food stamps in some states. It never says there's other states where their unwilling gene donors are still held to be parents. Don't humans usually decide all the things somewhere? These are just kids. Why would the law try and push towards abandoning them?
Also it says 'hacksperm' were used by lesbians who wanted kids. But there are jolies, there are celebrity kids made of sperm with DNA from female celebrities. So, the tech is there to just... make a two mother baby? Why wouldn't they do that? And okay, the story isn't about the ones who would do that. But it's making me think.
Also it reckons no female star has a 'troublesome' Y chromosome to worry about getting the incorrect gender of child, and that... that's not... well that's not the point of this story but um.
So the story is about how people decided to treat a whole new section of society horribly, and it's interesting because it makes it plausible, and has stuff to say about celebrity culture.
But it doesn't have a ray of light, a possibility for an alternative. There's no mention of people being treated well, of being, you know, kids. I keep on thinking of how Cordelia Vorkosigan would meet these people, her being a celebrity on her world, and how she'd just be... joyous and greedy for them, for such a huge family, but also feel bad about each and every one of them she hadn't done her best by. And there's no trace of that in this story, the idea that some of these kids would be wanted.
There's just a weirdly high rate of kids put up for adoption, considering the sperm to make them was expensive in the first place, and a mention in passing of a lot of institutionalised crazy people being dupes.
And then it's like, which makes more sense, everyone reacting that way, or society coming up with a new explanation for a set of people it doesn't like? They didn't gene test the guy's crush to decide he's a cruise, they looked at photos. How many people look a little bit like a celebrity really?
And it's interesting, but depressing, and incomplete in ways that make me ??? but are probably because the point of view guy is just the biggest jerk and doesn't hardly know it. But only probably.
So there's a lot going on in there.
Interesting stuff.
But stuff that makes me want to unravel it and write things kinder right away.