Kinship

A major part of cultural anthropology is understanding family ties, like who you're related to, marriage rules, and post-wedding living situations. For Harmonia, I thought it would be just like a supercomputer to disregard the importance of human love. Many difficulties stem from the fact that children are not raised consistently with the same values. Ultimately, parents are the single most important influence on a child. So, Scientica thought to eliminate this influence. Its solution was to ban all human sexual contact in favor of curating the biological materials from adults and bringing them together in a test tube. Children do not have a relationship with their parents. These parents possess no connection to each other, save for brief introductions. This aspect of the story was not easy to engineer! It is hard to deny sexuality. However, I believed that in this society, I wanted sexuality to be suppressed—made unnatural, which might appear strange to us now. Given that this process spanned centuries under Scientica's dominion, is it a possibility?

For your information, I'm working on two more novels for this series, and they won't lack intimate human contact like this one. Some supercomputers seem to get it, some don’t. (Thom Holmes)