Navvilus

Lol, give them time to read it! (Time for books to arrive, time to digest the story...)

Ahh, so who gets to decide which people are 'deserving', or 'worthy'? etc.

...Aside from it being kinda wrong for a nation-state to restrict the freedom of scientific research without clear evidence of there being a danger to the public. No offence to Chris, of course, but i do not consider these books to be sufficient evidence that genetic engineering is dangerous... nor do i consider these books to be evidence that you could use genetic engineering to impart supernatural powers on people!

Ditto...

Or 'thankyou', for that matter... That's an interesting history there for 'judgement'. I can see that dropping the silent E is ever-so-slightly more phonetic than leaving it in (as far as English spelling is ever phonetic), but keeping it in seems much more regular - ie not changing the spelling of the verb before the suffix. (pause as i re-read what i just typed...) Not CHANGing the spelling...? Sheesh. Stupid English language... grumble...

Actually, my dictionary prefers 'judgement' (as do my eyes!), relegating 'judgment' to the status of an obscure alternate spelling. I'm using the OED.

...whereas, as far as i'm concerned, that's already happened. I hate it when people tell me marriage is a 'religious thing' because it isn't, and it wasn't religious originally. It's a social institution. I know a tonne of married atheists, after all. Marriage is about declaring a partnership's status for legal purposes - an easy way of re-assigning next-of-kin status and formalising domestic relationships - and the fact that organised religions have decided to co-opt the institution when it suits their needs to do so is beside the point. I think we need to take the religious connotations back out of the word 'marriage', rather than trying to adopt some kind of cumbersome term like 'civil partnership' - it just doesn't work as a verb, for one thing. I've never heard people talk about someone being 'civilly partnered', people just say 'married', regardless of the technicalities and regardless of whether or not religion was involved; similarly people usually just say 'husband' or 'wife' instead of 'civil partner' because it's just plain easier. Why should the Church get first pick of the easy words? They didn't invent marriage!

That sounds like a weird assumption to me. Parents are rarely the only adults in a child's life. Most kids grow up surrounded by male-female couples. Personally, the only arguments based on 'lack of role models' that i find plausible involve people not realising they're gay 'cos they've hardly ever seen any examples of how same-sex couples act like (not that that would be any different, if, as you say, 'love is love'). That's especially true in this fictional context where anything other than one man and one woman seems to be against the law, and the only queer role models would be criminals, and Darien would be the cop...

...and vegetarian too.

And here was me wanting Elias to propose to Darien, 'n all... :: sigh :: ...

There's evidence in the text that Darien is deliberately ignoring Elias's advances and refusing to think about them (ie in Chapter Ten, where the reference to the Code of Morality pops up). His apparent obliviousness is a tactic of resistance in and of itself, even if it's only a passive one.