Re: Sapient Snacks?
 

See the bibliography in DEEP BEYOND

Re: Sapient Snacks?
 

If I lived in the THS universe, I'd be a vigilante battling against abominations like sapient snack food. It's flamethrower time, baby. The creators would be killed, as would those who ate the little guys.

Re: Sapient Snacks?
 

Well I suspect you wouldn't live long. The security outfits on Silas Duncan Station are efficient, and nobody likes flamethrowers in space. Why the rancor? They aren't actually sapient, you know, and they only exist in Duncanite habs anyway. If you wanted to get all righteous or something, I'd think pan-sapient rights is a better cause, YMMV.

Re: Sapient Snacks?
 

They are icky, but the only offense is really against taste and personal sensibilities. So long as the food the snack is made of is safe to eat, I really don't see a problem. I do see asking people that eat them to leave. I could see it being an easy thing to ban by law because it is icky.

Re: Sapient Snacks?
 

I would ban them, but not because they are icky. (I'm not a fan of obscenity laws in any context.)
Even though in THS they are incapable of producing truly sapient food, it is "foot in the door" technology. Better ban it before real atrocities occur hidden under a veneer of acceptability.

Re: Sapient Snacks?
 

Isn't that fundamentally impossible in Duncanite society.

Re: Sapient Snacks?
 

In a society where literally everything goes, probably not. I would inflict harsh penalties for anyone doing business with those violating such basic laws... or those committing such nastiness when there.

Re: Sapient Snacks?
 

I think they'd be really popular especially if you could get them custom-made in a reasonable amount of time. You can't just murder someone, but you could bite the head off a strawberry flavored snack version of them.

You could go to the store( or whate'er they have in THS) and pick up a Forty and the Revenge Pack of the week. They could make M&M nostalgia specials of those M&M guys you really could talk with before you eat them.

It'd be fun to run a one-shot of snack food hoping to escape the larder and find some kind of sanctuary.

Re: Sapient Snacks?
 

I'm deeply disturbed by the grotesque future many so called transhumanists seem to desire in the real world. Bioethics is lagging behind the real world technology, as it stands now. I can only imagine the horrors awaiting us if we don't get serious about placing restraints on experiments and especially on the commerical application of biotech.

Back to THS- I would probably enjoy playing a pan-sapient rights crusader. Thanks for the suggestion, sir_pudding.

Re: Sapient Snacks?
 

One thing that the Internet taught me is that there is a market and a fetish for pretty much anything imaginable - and quite a few things that my imagination doesn't want to have anything to do with, thank you very much.

And given that it has become increasingly easy to self-manufacture even the strangest stuff (no longer just "print on demand" - "build on demand", thanks to minifacs and biofacs), it does not surprise me in the slightest that creepy stuff - the kind of stuff that you can only find in the darkest corners of the internet today - proliferates, and I laud the authors not to ignore the sense of perversion hidden in humanity's collective soul.