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I say we program in hideous BEETUS.

Because fuck the future, that's why.

Not quite enough horrific irony in there for me. Couldn't we make them severely diabetic, otherwise nigh unkillable supermen, whose sweat has the same saccharine composition as a Snickers milkshake. That was something as simple as the secretions from there own skin could drive them into coma followed by inevitable Blue Oyster Cult death?

Germany, I believe you wanted to say something?

"Ja, look, I know it zeems bahd, but you kan change! Jhust look aht me! I used to be zo much vorse zhen you, und now I'm completely zane"

http://phys.org/news/2013-10-rewrite-entire-genomeand-healthy.html

This is a huge first step toward making baseline humans such are ourselves completely irrelevant and paving the way for our post-human, Godlike, Charmin soft extra fluffy descendants. Woot Woot and a Woot woot all around says I!  What say you gaggle of scurvy forum peeps?

This thread actually reminded me of a story idea i had: the concepts was there was a highly intelligent insectile race, with the intellect, drive and will to create advanced technology, but no concept of society. they are born alone, raise themselves, feed themselves, teach  themselves and whatever they create in their lifetime is ultimately lost, because it either goes unfinished or is looted by some other insect who wants their raw materials for their own project. Basically it's what a race of people would LITERALLY have to be in order to truly be everything that RUGGED INDIVIDUALISTS claim to be.

the way i pictured it, they function kinda like the Brain Bugs from Starship Troopers, they can attack other members of their species and learn what they know by eating the loser's brain. This triggers the insect's body to disintegrate, leaving an egg that will hatch into another insect, who will know only some of what their parent did.

That sounds like a fantastic moral parable the likes of which old school Trek used to play with. A race whose existence is both fantastic and futile, who together could conquer the cosmos and leave a legacy amongst the stars if banded together but on their own are cursed with the Sisyphean task to reinvent the wheel. Would read

But the OP is looking for a "literary erection", so, you know, take it for what it's worth.

Whoa whoa whoa buddy, I said "supple literary erection", I am no cretin, I have a collection of smoking pipes which receive intermediate use thankyouverymuchly

I don't think BB is actually an anthropologist.

My degree and status as an unemployed person beg to differ sir

Hm. It seems the trick here is that they FOUND technology.

I'd hazard a guess that a culture that develops advanced tech would, in the process, lose their "tribality".

Roger, wasn't that a theme in one of your pre-Charley-fallout stories?

Tech that was advanced ENOUGH might actually encourage tribalism. For example, imagine a world where we take sustainability issues seriously, and as a result start focusing on food regions and local economies. Everyone's connected to the internet, everyone has access to fairly high levels of education, and the population has gone through a period of decline before stabilizing. What we might end up with is cities, surrounded by farmland, in which most people live, work, and attend school within their neighborhoods. A city would, in a sense, become a coalition of tribes, with each tribe recognizable by its neighborhood.

Indeed! I'd read the hell out of a story set in a world like that. While I'm not sure how likely this is it certainly seem possible to me. As an anthropologist I'd also argue that humans fundamentally drifts toward a tribal state and we subconsciously try to recreate it through social clicks, trends, nations, ect.

Hm. It seems the trick here is that they FOUND technology.

I'd hazard a guess that a culture that develops advanced tech would, in the process, lose their "tribality".

Roger, wasn't that a theme in one of your pre-Charley-fallout stories?

Hmmm, I'd say not necessarily in regards to tribality being a transitional stage into a society like ours. That presupposes that cultural evolution somehow as an inevitable set end result. The society we live in today is really something of happy accident.

Um. Buck, has it occurred to you that there are non-western authors that currently exist, and that they write science fiction that are culturally non-western-based?


More to the point, do you understand that non-western cultures are not automatically "tribal"?

Of course not all non-western cultures are tribal, and would love to read more sci-fi stories written about them, but the point of my post was to try and find it any sci-fi stories exist about technologically advanced tribal civilizations. As I said, if one of Earths many low-tech tribal civs and developed advanced technology

[because a friend pressured me into as one does when building up a patsy to take the rap for a brutal murder]

Why hello there all you sexy, sexy people and Gary. I am here now. I'd like to officially use this thread to welcome you to my brief online life at this specific forum. Go ahead! Mix some white wine and seven-up and serve it to your friends and family tonight. When they are good and intoxicated, pull down your Gene Shalit glasses and causally mention I joined the bored before coyly inquiring, "jealous?". They will not be.

I joined these boards not just because a friend pressured me into as one does when building up a patsy to take the rap for a brutal murder, but also because like all of you I am a huge, HUGE fan of Discs of and about Chicago's O'Hare international airport! Though I am a novice , I have collected something of an impressive assortment of discs ranging from sounds of planes taking off and landing at O'Hare to the gentle susurrus of the foodcort to even a rare vinyl pressing of Milton Friedman describing the airport and his experiences in it.

Now of course I have been a member of and lurked on all the other major O'Hare audio fanclub forums out there, but the idea of extraordinary individuals taking it even farther and developing a religo-philosophy dedicated specifically to hard format O'Hare material deeply intrigued me, so here I am!

I hope to get to know all of you, share great discussions, and learn how you got into O'Hare based tunes

Wow, this guy sounds like a huge dick. :P

Please, please, "Grande genital interactions" was my mother, you can just call me Mr. Grande genital interactions

Those all sound great and give me teh supple literary erection which poets have long searched for, but post apocalyptic isn't quite what I mean. What I mean is advanced civilizations that are not western in nature. Like if the Yanomami people of the Amazon or the Iroquois confederacy had developed the internal combustion engine or warp drives instead of the west. There was a recent string of books that did this to varying degrees from a Middle Eastern perspective like "Alif the Unseen". But I'm not even sure if the tribal sci-fi that I'm looking for is even a thing, perhaps it is the new fabled literary erection of our time

Oh my, this IS embarrassing. I thought I had registered for the "Principia Disc-ORD-ia" forum. Still, my white suburban sense of the Bushido code compels me to stay. Thanks all!

The whole Dark Tower series is so money, my greatest fear/hope is that Hollywood will finally get to filming it. I highly recommend you continue with it Sir and or Madam

So I've nurtured an interest in science fiction that presents a non-western aesthetic and culture since childhood. Like any good nerd I love Star Trek, BSG, yadda yadda yadda, but watching the original Star Wars trilogy and Dune really captivated my imagination and sent me into a tizzy of ".......I want to go to there." I dug the Otherness of their worlds. A couple of nights ago I watched the new Will Smith picture "After Earth" (I know) and it was, as you may well have imagined, a Godawful double serving of abortion-cobbler (I KNOW!) but recognized that wondrous paleo-future vibe and makes my little heart as gay as springtime. Gone were the mandatory automatic doors which adorn every good, stale and sanitized spaceship in the galaxy and instead in their place were hanging palm leaves standing as barrier between the chambers. And with that an old flame within me was reignited. Does anyone else know of any novels, movies, or tv shows that don't follow the path laid out by Clark and Roddenberry and instead opted to go with a more tribalistic (primitive is a culturally biased as fuck term but it does evoke what I'm going for) interpretation of humanities future amongst the stars? I'd also adore anything Asiatic, Middle Eastern, or whatever. Any recommendations would be much appreciated. 

Why hello there all you sexy, sexy people and Gary. I am here now. I'd like to officially use this thread to welcome you to my brief online life at this specific forum. Go ahead! Mix some white wine and seven-up and serve it to your friends and family tonight. When they are good and intoxicated, pull down your Gene Shalit glasses and causally mention I joined the bored before coyly inquiring, "jealous?". They will not be.

I joined these boards not just because a friend pressured me into as one does when building up a patsy to take the rap for a brutal murder, but also because like all of you I am a huge, HUGE fan of Discs of and about Chicago's O'Hare international airport! Though I am a novice , I have collected something of an impressive assortment of discs ranging from sounds of planes taking off and landing at O'Hare to the gentle susurrus of the foodcort to even a rare vinyl pressing of Milton Friedman describing the airport and his experiences in it.

Now of course I have been a member of and lurked on all the other major O'Hare audio fanclub forums out there, but the idea of extraordinary individuals taking it even farther and developing a religo-philosophy dedicated specifically to hard format O'Hare material deeply intrigued me, so here I am!

I hope to get to know all of you, share great discussions, and learn how you got into O'Hare based tunes