Honorverse ramblings and musings

cthia wrote:I always found it odd that Alfred and Allison only had one child. Honor was an only child until a crisis on Grayson held the stork at political gunpoint.

I found it odd because Allison was so beautiful and was such a sex kitten. Really, having a beautiful and sexy woman from Beowulf is like winning the happy lottery.

JeffEngel wrote:

cthia wrote:I always found it odd that Alfred and Allison only had one child. Honor was an only child until a crisis on Grayson held the stork at political gunpoint.

I found it odd because Allison was so beautiful and was such a sex kitten. Really, having a beautiful and sexy woman from Beowulf is like winning the happy lottery.

Allison, unlike her easily distracted oldest daughter, can attend to her birth control measures without pesky things like capture and being declared dead divert her from keeping them up to date!

Moreover, they had time. She'd be perfectly capable of easy pregnancies and childbirth, without concern about tubing, for fifteen decades, at a conservative minimum. It was always the plan. A little succession crisis in Harrington Steading was merely a reminder. So they got around to it.

Sex and reproduction, for a Beowulf girl and her hulking consort, are entirely separable. I'm sure they were enjoying vast amounts of the former while having precisely the amount of the latter they chose.

JeffEngel wrote:

cthia wrote:I always found it odd that Alfred and Allison only had one child. Honor was an only child until a crisis on Grayson held the stork at political gunpoint.

I found it odd because Allison was so beautiful and was such a sex kitten. Really, having a beautiful and sexy woman from Beowulf is like winning the happy lottery.

Allison, unlike her easily distracted oldest daughter, can attend to her birth control measures without pesky things like capture and being declared dead divert her from keeping them up to date!

Moreover, they had time. She'd be perfectly capable of easy pregnancies and childbirth, without concern about tubing, for fifteen decades, at a conservative minimum. It was always the plan. A little succession crisis in Harrington Steading was merely a reminder. So they got around to it.

Sex and reproduction, for a Beowulf girl and her hulking consort, are entirely separable. I'm sure they were enjoying vast amounts of the former while having precisely the amount of the latter they chose.

Johnathan_S wrote:The original plan (and it could have just been a tentative one) may well have been to wait until both Alison and Alfred got burned out, or otherwise needed a break or a change from their medical practices before deciding to go raise siblings to Honor.

RFC mentioned in some of his posts that its become not uncommon for prolong recipients to take significant multi-year breaks from work, or even to entirely switch fields, after decades working in their field. They have time for entire multiple successive carriers (possibly with some temporary retirement thrown in between them - all without physically aging). One of those temporary retirements might be a good time to have some more kids.

SWM wrote:Cthia talks about various culture shocks between our world and Honor's, including drug addiction. I won't bother quoting it.

Yes, there are enormous differences between our world and Honor's. It's hard to imagine all the small differences. But one difference we do know of is the quality of the mental health profession.

In the story of Princess Adrienne, we see some glimpses of that. If I recall correctly, the text implies that most people with tendencies toward violence or other egregious criminal behavior are caught young and treated by mental health specialists. Apparently they do a pretty good job, in general. They can detect and treat the tendencies even before they start to manifest. The amount of criminal violence is quite low on Manticore, even several hundred years ago.

I expect that the same is true of addictive behavior. It is likely that most people prone to addiction are treated early. That won't stop addiction, of course. People will still do stupid things. But I think it will mitigate the problem a lot.

Dauntless wrote:Princess Adrienne?
you need the worlds of honour anthology. story 2 i believe. titled something like "the price of dreams".

cthia wrote:Yes, but what I was alluding to was the obvious love between the two of them. They reminded me of my own parents, always flirting with each other like they were newlyweds. Now assuming that Honor was a planned birth - on one of those hiatuses mentioned - why wouldn't they want to go ahead and have two or three? So that Honor wouldn't be a lonely only child? And having stairsteps accomplishes that as well as makes efficient use of the birthing period, hiatus. And love, immense love like they obviously have for each other, makes one want to create little images of your better half. Wouldn't Allison want a son favoring his daddy? A chip off the big block? Perhaps even an Alfred Jr. - a marine aboard Honor's ship looking after his sister?

Perhaps RFC foresaw that if Honor had a brother close to her age then Pavel Young would have had his ass kicked long ago as the gossip surely would have reached his ears.

cthia wrote:I wonder if the database of all ships that departed Earth after the final wars in search of strange new worlds are all accounted for - with such a huge volume of space, ripe for many Boltholes and hidden colonies, I wonder if every maiden voyage has been contacted? Or if there is somewhere a Lost Colony that failed to advance in technology - whose tech base has even degraded - living a life on the cusp of the old west or worse. But certainly has no space-faring ability.

Just a musing.

SWM wrote:

cthia wrote:
Yes, but what I was alluding to was the obvious love between the two of them. They reminded me of my own parents, always flirting with each other like they were newlyweds. Now assuming that Honor was a planned birth - on one of those hiatuses mentioned - why wouldn't they want to go ahead and have two or three? So that Honor wouldn't be a lonely only child? And having stairsteps accomplishes that as well as makes efficient use of the birthing period, hiatus. And love, immense love like they obviously have for each other, makes one want to create little images of your better half. Wouldn't Allison want a son favoring his daddy? A chip off the big block? Perhaps even an Alfred Jr. - a marine aboard Honor's ship looking after his sister?

Perhaps RFC foresaw that if Honor had a brother close to her age then Pavel Young would have had his ass kicked long ago as the gossip surely would have reached his ears.

That might be your reaction, but I assure that a lot of people in the world would disagree with you. Some people really want only one child, or one child at a time. When you combine that with the knowledge that you have more than a hundred years of fertility, and a health care system that ensure almost all children reach adulthood, and a thousand years of social changes which separates sex from reproduction, it is even less surprising.

Take a look at the average number of children in middle-class American families, especially children born to second or third generation Americans.