2 Comments

  1. I would love Dr. Rajaniemi to explain why his elephants are GRACILE (acronym). Reference is made twice. Since Finland is the hub of the gracile genetic syndrome and the infants usually die before birth or are severely deformed, I am really curious, why gracile elephants? (currently as far as I know, only a human syndrome but no reason why it should not be a developmental problem for other mammals especially in his quantum world.
    (Realize this is not the ideal site to ask the question, but he is less accessible than Charles Stross used to be.)

    1. I’m no authority and I have no inside connection to Rajaniemi (we’ve met once briefly at a convention, but then again so have many others) but from the context of the book, I assumed that gracile (ie; slender, thin) elephants were just a bit of incongruous background detail meant to show !The Future!: We don’t associate the word gracile with elephants… but there they are, with the acrobats and the trained megaparrots.

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