You know, they aren’t the “Trade Federation”, but I come out of this post with a distinctly East Asian impression of the Super Happy Fun People, which I think probably shouldn’t happen for a truly alien race, since I would expect its variance from humanity to be orthogonal to ethnic and cultural differences. It may just be the names and superlatives, but I think that the shadows of Buddhism are having some of the effect. OTOH, that really might be a fairly strong universal attractor in which case I’m being unfair.
Also, it seems to me that part of the intention of the story is to put us in the middle of a situation where motivations are symmetric in both directions, but that doesn’t really happen. The SHFP values and generally existence call out to humans as plausibly a more proper expression of our values than our own existence is, though we are told that physical ugliness tends to drive us away. The human values do not have the same effect on the baby eaters, thus the humans don’t face a threat to their values analogous to that faced by the baby eaters.
Also, a very important question regards the nature of baby eater children. I’m not sure in what sense they can be a lot like human children but not value “good”, yet if they do value “good” where in their evolution does that value come from.
You know, they aren’t the “Trade Federation”, but I come out of this post with a distinctly East Asian impression of the Super Happy Fun People, which I think probably shouldn’t happen for a truly alien race, since I would expect its variance from humanity to be orthogonal to ethnic and cultural differences. It may just be the names and superlatives, but I think that the shadows of Buddhism are having some of the effect. OTOH, that really might be a fairly strong universal attractor in which case I’m being unfair.
Also, it seems to me that part of the intention of the story is to put us in the middle of a situation where motivations are symmetric in both directions, but that doesn’t really happen. The SHFP values and generally existence call out to humans as plausibly a more proper expression of our values than our own existence is, though we are told that physical ugliness tends to drive us away. The human values do not have the same effect on the baby eaters, thus the humans don’t face a threat to their values analogous to that faced by the baby eaters.
Also, a very important question regards the nature of baby eater children. I’m not sure in what sense they can be a lot like human children but not value “good”, yet if they do value “good” where in their evolution does that value come from.