Lit Reproductive technologies in (and appropriate for) Star Wars?

idk, the Clone Wars era Holonet News is very much a website. and the new Servants of the Empire books (which take place around 3 bby) feature Merei Spanjaf doing of remote slicing from her datapad, sometimes in her bedroom. that's just how sci-fi is sometimes, people can't imagine technology until it actually exists.



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It might look like a website, but it may in reality be a fancy tour-guide with some news attached to it. That's how a datapad was described in earlier incarnations. Something that has a set of data on it. More of a high-tech book than an actual iPad. As for Servants of the Empire, remember that it's new canon and (in-universe) tech in Disney canon may differ from Legends canon. They ditched all of Legends, which means they can set up new rules as they see fit for the universe. And (out of universe) of course, modern books are going to have a more 'modernistic' view of the HoloNet that makes it more of an internet than an ethernet.

 

WTF. This is ridiculous on so many levels. Like I feel like have to recite the good Doctor Ball here. Were these doctors all Alderaanian hippie homeopath nuts? I hope they rewrite that bunch of nonsense.

 

#ProudDroidParent is the SW equivalent of crazy cat owners maybe?

As for alternatives, I do like the idea of tech that lets one clone a zygote from the two hopeful parents' dna.

 

I don't see any problem with medical tech in Star Wars being a little behind-it's part of the conservative nature of the GFFA-why does Alderaan have an aristocracy, why aren't their more avant garde types, and so forth. Society in Star Wars is very old and hence doesn't change progress is slow and and takes an incredibly long time to be distributed.

In other words it's not earth 2016 or Star Trek even-and in some ways Star Trek portrays a pretty conservative society.

Star Wars is a 19/medieval/ancient China/ well you get the picture it's not utopian and tech isn't evenly progressing nor is social norms.

 

Part of me wants to be cool with that, the other is thinking "well if they replaced Luke's arm and Grievous's everything, what are they doing wrong with Breha?"

 

"As royal physician, it is my learned opinion that her womb is filled with sea serpents."

- Alderaan's royal physician, Dr. Nick Riviera

 

I like the idea that there are variants of the B'omarr spider droids that, instead of having brains in the jar, are just walking artificial wombs to ensure that overproductive helicopter parents (skyhopper parents?) can keep a visual tab on their kid's growth.

 

Well, comparing it to those two, they could implant her with a cloning tank?

 

So is no one going to mention that New Canon Lando comic where that same-sex cat alien couple is working for Lando so they can afford a clone to be their child? And the cat aliens are both themselves clones?

Granted Trip said he was only interested in Old Canon stuff, but I thought it might be relevant.

 

Now you mention it, I never really managed to understand whether the cat aliens were clones of the same individual or had different templates.

 

Can we talk about different kinds of Force lightning, instead?

 

i hate you

 

I don't really agree. The entire point of using these elements (drawn from fairy-tale settings, Japanese cinema and culture, and other historical societies) is precisely to create a sense of foreignness, strangeness, and wonder in the audience...a sense of being plunged into a world that is not like our world, that runs according to rules beyond our understanding, and has prominent cultural elements that don't fit with our experiences. It's supposed to replicate the experience of reading a fairy tale or a historical legend or listening to a mythological opera, not reading realistic modern literature or science fiction.

True, we're supposed to be at least vaguely familiar with most of the elements--but even a lot of the point of our familiarity is to increase our feeling of strangeness. We are reminded, even subconciously, of the strangeness to us of Japanese cinema or Medieval knight's tales, or our wonder in encountering stories of supernatural destiny, or even our own subconscious cultural aversion to British people, Nazi-looking uniforms, the Papacy, and so on and so forth. Our familiarity makes possible our profound sense of being in a strange place and time, among strange people.

Whenever I rewatch ANH, I'm struck by just what a masterful job GL does of constantly bombarding us with strangeness, reminding us of innumerable things foreign and familiar (like Nazis or fairy tales or Samurai or subconscious stereotypes of British people), but using them at every turn to create a sense of wonder and mythic significance.

Of course, at the heart of ANH is Luke Skywalker, American Teenager--but this is brilliant as well, since it gives us someone through whose familiar eyes we can experience the wonder of this strange place. ANH is not a historically-informed look at a society based on Medieval Japan or something--it's a mythic pastiche, at the heart of which is a profound sense of cultural strangeness and unfamiliarity.

Anytime an element gets introduced into Star Wars merely on the basis of "Yeah, this would for sure exist because the GFFA is just like post-modern contemporary America, and we gotta keep things familiar and realistic and grounded," I regard it as a profound defeat.

Keep Star Wars weird, man.

 

I'm not sure either, my post was originally going to read "And the cat aliens are also clones of each other" but then I realized I didn't know for sure.

 

I do recall some sort of entertainment hologram or something referenced in Tempest (LOTF). Star Wars isn't Star Trek in its constant obsession over technical details and and so forth. I would imagine rich and middle class core and inner rim beings probably have access to some fancy tech.

In the end Star Wars is quintessential space opera and quite honestly of all the major sci fi/space fantasy framchises-SW, ST, BSG, and probably others I can't think of is the most mystical.

 

I read the cat guys as a typical same-sex couple but I think it's very much intended to be ambiguous.

 

What you mean the cathar?

 

So I had an even better idea! Who's to say that Owen and Beru didn't have any kids? Sure, we do not see them at the moisture farm. But what if they had three kids around Luke's age (two of them in the hut when Ben delivers Luke to the Lars farm, one slightly younger)? Three sons who constantly made Luke do all the dirty work, and who were all allowed to go to the Academy right away?

Since we're deep in fairy tale territory, why not turn Luke into Cinderella? OMG, this would even explain why Luke, being a good boy, is sad to see the Lars family dead, but is also totally over their deaths two scenes later.

I love you.

 

I really like the idea that Star Wars had backwards technology in some ways.

But often SW is backwards because our own technology at the time the movies/books were made wasn't as good as it is now. The authors in this case were writing within the confines of what was realistic then. This is the case for reproductive technology, like the nonsense surrounding Breha. If you've got organ replacement and gene splicing in the GFFA, or even skip that and go straight for external fertilization, which we'd be able to do with humans by now if we didn't have laws. This isn't anything as crazy as what they did with Vader, Grievous, and all the other cyborgs. You don't even have to do any cyborging.

 

In the real world, a Breha-like problem (unable to safely carry a child to term) would be solved with a combination of IVF and surrogacy - which have been a thing for quite a while.

In the SW-verse, maybe surrogacy just isn't a thing. They have cloning, and "artificial wombs" for the clones to grow in - but that's on Kamino, which is not part of the Republic.

 

OMG IL you did not just try to explain women's health to me.

Yes, I know that. As I understood it in that Obi-Wan book (the Miller one), IVF must have been tried on her and failed or else they were just dosing her with hormones. There was no mention a surrogate parent was used (which seemed to imply she didn't want it, as many people don't today for personal reasons). But there are multiple ways we've tried to get around that in IRL, but the problem is a lot involve experimenting and we have laws preventing that.

 

I wasn't sure what you were referring to by:

external fertilization, which we'd be able to do with humans by now if we didn't have laws.


since IVF is already legal.

Was it artificial wombs that you were thinking of when you mentioned laws preventing experimenting?

 

No, the unamed feline species in the Lando comic.

 

I'm gonna go with this. SW isn't future sci-fi, it's literally "long, long ago" sci-fi, when people still widely practiced things like conscription (the Jedi Order, clones) and nobody thought anything of it. Same for Jedi padawans; pages and squires, kids training around the Buddhist temples, etc. could be young, and knights' squires could certainly see a battlefield at something like 14 or 15. So this is a past setting full of medieval practices and flavor (with a Roman senate), rather than Trek's enlightened future.

Cloning from multiple parents feels more like Trek to me. Even cloning from one parent is probably out of most people's reach either because of lack of opportunity (long waiting list at Kamino!) or it being prohibitively expensive and/or heavily restricted by Republic/Empire laws. Things like this would explain why, say, a successful bounty hunter or a wealthy senator don't already have the kids they wanted before a lucky opportunity falls out of the sky. So I would go with adoption as the most common practice (and let's not forget "different species who can't reproduce together" in addition to same-sex couples and infertility), with a single-parent clone being an option not readily available to most people, and a multi-parent clone not really being a thing.

Plus if multi-parent cloning were even an option, surely the clone army would have been made with as many badass donors as possible combined into an attempt at a supersoldier, rather than just one guy. And if anyone could have afforded to try such a thing, it would have been the various forces paying for the clone army.