The Vorkosigan Companion - Lillian Stewart Carl [50]
Falling Free is mostly concerned with the origin of the quaddies, but the quaddies are revisited in a story that takes place a few hundred years later, contemporaneous with Miles, and they have thrived and populated a number of space habitats (Diplomatic Immunity).
In Diplomatic Immunity, much of the action takes place in the quaddies' part of the galaxy, and many of the characters are quaddies. At that time, the technology also exists to aid quaddie/human couples in having children of either the human or quaddie type—or any other mix, for that matter (Diplomatic Immunity).
Fully functional hermaphrodites were created on Beta, one of the planets in the Vorkosiverse, but were a short-lived experiment (The Warrior's Apprentice). It never caught on as a preferred way of life, but one of the main characters in many of the books is a herm (The Warrior's Apprentice, Mirror Dance).
Yet another planet in the Vorkosiverse, Cetaganda, rules its entire multi-planetary system based on the manipulation of genomes (Cetaganda). The highest echelons of the society (the haut) are in charge of the Cetagandan genomes. The children of the haut are carefully genetically crafted by the women of the Star Crèche, placed in their uterine replicators, and distributed once a year to the rest of the haut, a very precious cargo to be delivered to the Cetagandan planets (Diplomatic Immunity). Thus, those who control the genomes in the Cetagandan society have the most power—and the struggle to control that power exists at the highest levels, as Miles discovers in Cetaganda.
Though the Cetagandans have these awesome powers of genetic manipulation, they must also experiment. They do so by testing new gene combinations in a class of genderless servants called ba who cannot reproduce. Diplomatic Immunity's plot not only concerns uterine replicators, but also hinges on one of these servants.
However, not all the genetic manipulation in the Vorkosiverse is on such a population-wide scale. A main character in Diplomatic Immunity is engineered to live underwater, which includes frog-like webbed hands and feet and a set of gills to go along with his lungs.
In Ethan of Athos, a very top-secret Cetagandan gene- manipulation experiment goes wild, and another top-secret gene- manipulation experiment to produce super-soldiers does the same in "Labyrinth." Though the victim of experimentation in Ethan of Athos does not appear again, the created super-soldier first seen in "Labyrinth" has a very interesting relationship with Miles, remains one of the major and most memorable characters in the Vorkosiverse, and becomes one of the two main characters in "Winterfair Gifts." Thus, wholescale genetic manipulation is a key factor in the Vorkosiverse.
Is it possible to manipulate genes and genomes in the same way today? On the one hand, people have been manipulating genes by agricultural methods and animal husbandry for thousands of years, and, for a hundred years now, scientists have been mutating, altering, and adding individual genes to lab model organisms which include plants, bacteria, yeast, worms, fruit flies, mice, and human cells. On the other hand, the kind of genetic manipulation implied by the substitution of limbs, a fully functioning hermaphrodite, and the rest described in the previous paragraphs is completely beyond what is attainable today. The comprehensive knowledge of what genes need to be manipulated to make those kinds of changes simply does not exist.
Scientists are mostly discovering the function of genes one by one, though all of the genome sequencing projects proliferating within the last five or so