Hugin & Munin Journal

In Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan novels, the uterine replicator—an artificial womb capable of gestating a fetus outside the human body—is rarely treated as an isolated marvel. It becomes part of the ordinary machinery of civilisation, changing family formation, gender relations, inheritance and the political organisation of entire societies. In Ethan of Athos , it allows an all-male colony to reproduce without women carrying pregnancies or participating in the society, although the colony still depends on ovarian cultures originally derived from women. Bujold described the uterine replicator as one of the technologies she had thought through carefully, while preferring to display its implications rather than burden the story with technical explanation. That is also what makes the invention useful outside fiction. The machine matters less as a spectacular device than as the centre of a new social arrangement. Artificial wombs are usually imagined through familiar scenes: an ext...

Science fiction usually presents teleportation as a solution to distance. Yet a machine capable of reconstructing a living human would also be a medical system of extraordinary precision. If it could rebuild the body, why rebuild the cancer with it? Why reproduce an arthritic joint, a damaged heart valve or the accumulated deterioration of old age? Movement might be the least consequential thing such a machine could do. A transporter would require a description detailed enough to reproduce organs, blood vessels, neural connections and whatever physical structures allow memory and personality to continue. That descriptive power would not automatically amount to medical understanding. A machine can copy an abnormality perfectly without knowing whether it is harmful, harmless or necessary. But once the reconstruction process can be compared with genetic information, earlier scans and models of human anatomy, transportation ceases to be a neutral act. The machine no longer merely ask...