Rich and Strange Aeons

Lois Bujold has referred to California -- or California before it got "wonky" -- as the inspiration for Beta Colony. "Very politically correct, very liberal, with some hidden illiberalities." Big on sexual freedom and education -- 60s and 70s California, and Pat Brown's California of the nearly free colleges, not the dying school system of Proposition 13 California. And in universe Beta is an America colony, and the only American colony.

Nonetheless, the more I learn about Switzerland and think about Beta, the more the two seem to line up in my head. Coincidence, my selective filters, or the natural result of highly democratic states? You may judge.

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I'd never noticed that she could be named for Cordelia.

And Kareen after the late Princess, and Olivia possibly after Aral's mother. Martya can't be shoehorned in.

( 19-21 Sep were very busy days )

Oy. Wifi died right before I posted this. Router hiccup? Computer's back to not wanting to connect; I dug out my ethernet cable. Mouse froze, as it did after the earlier connection, which I didn't mention; switching to a text prompt and back helped last time. This time... did that, did that again, minimized all the windows, logged in at the text prompt, finally it unfroze. :(

A draft, for the Bujold list, contrast of the Abh and Bujold's haut.
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I recently watched the anime Crest of the Stars, and liked it a lot. It's part space opera, part character romance, part worldbuilding regarding the Abh race by a wannabe science fictional Tolkien (we can has conlang). But I'm not out to specifically review it here; rather, I kept being reminded of Bujold as I watched, and I want to geek out about that.

(FWIW, the Crest of the Stars novels started in 1999, and Cetaganda came out in 1996.)
(Spoilers for backstory ahoy.)
(ETA: the Abh are allegedly all atheists. Cetagandan religious data is even scarcer than for other polities in Bujold's Nexus, but one guesses atheist.)
(ETA2: might be more accurate to say they're strongly non religious. "No belief in a Higher Power", "ridicule all organized religions", no belief in Heaven. I'd call the first one de facto atheist but people get nervous about labels.)

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We, alas, don't have gestation machines, and I wouldn't hold my breath for them. We do have a fair bit of fertility control -- planning, birth control, abortion -- which have had some social impacts already, and we might imagine might have more over evolutionary time. I've been thinking for the past day about the impact of widespread paternity testing, e.g. if such tests weren't used mostly only in cases of disputed child support but as a matter of course, even for married births, just to check for the father or as a side effect of genetic health screening. How does behavior change in the short term if fathers can be as certain as mothers of their children, and women (and men) know that reproductive cuckoldry just isn't possible? What are the long term selective pressures on human sexuality if such conditions (paternity testing and fertility control, and perhaps child support laws as well) are maintained for a long time?