The Vorkosigan Saga

Bujold, Lois McMaster. The Vorkosigan Saga. Wake Forest, NC: Baen Books (distribution: Simon & Schuster for USA, Diamond Book for UK),[1] 1986-date.[2] For copious bibliographical detail see the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, "Vorkosigan Universe" at link here.[3]

Wikipedia entry notes for comment "Technology," "Computing and communications," and "Military technology."[4] Under Technology:

Most of the technology in the series is based on 20th-century engineering situations, projected into null-g or alternative solar system situations. Biomedical advances such as cloning, artificial wombs (named "uterine replicators") and cryochambers to preserve and revive recently deceased people are featured heavily in the series.

Bujold presents issues of technological obsolescence and the high rate of failure of R&D projects in personal terms, via bioengineering. Two jump pilots with obsolete navigational brain implants [see below] and a number of characters created by genetic manipulation are psychologically stranded by the termination of the programs for which they were designed.

The series features gravity manipulation, both artificially generated in spaceships, and artificially suppressed in ground transport and elevators. Falling Free and Diplomatic Immunity explore the relationship between a culture adapted to an environment without gravity and one which depends on gravity.

For artificial wombs, cf. and contrast Brave New World and Woman on the Edge of Time. For the resurrection motif cf. and contrast Endymion and The Rise of Endymion, and Altered Carbon.[5] Implants are near ubiquitous; for examples from this wiki, see listings at link here.[6]

For "Computing and communications," note "wristconsoles" and "comconsoles" for portable and personal computing, and 3-D holograms. Note the realism that "Interstellar messages [...] have to be recorded on a physical disc which is transported through wormholes at a high cost, and relayed between wormholes by the ships' communication systems [...]."

With "Military technology," note combat suits: cf. and contrast such suits in Starship Troopers and The Forever War, plus variations on that theme among Imperial stormtroopers in the STAR WARS films.[7]

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The first book of the series, Shards of Hono(u)r (Cordelia Vorkosigan series; US: Baen, 1986 / UK: Headline, 1988),[8][9] at least in the Audible.com Blackstone Audio version, ends with a teaser or epilog with a spacecraft on mortuary duty after a battle retrieving bodies, and parts thereof, with a tractor beam and bringing them aboard. The med-tech performing retrieval, identification, the actual mortuary functions is a middle-age woman; the focalizing character of this two-person sequence is a young, male, newly-certified ship pilot. The technology we learn of here is sufficiently advanced that the pilot can, and enthusiastically does, get into direct interface between his brain and the ship, in a sense, temporarily, becoming the ship.[10] The brief sequence provides a striking juxtaposition of what William Gibson's cyberspace cowboys would call "the meat" and disembodiment into a variety of cyberspace and immediate re-embodiment in/as a highly advanced mechanism. Cf. and contrast Damon Knight's 1968 "Masks."

RDE, finishing, 9Oct21, 14Oct21