Strange Conversations: Part Twenty-Four

Nick and I have just had the nerdiest conversation I think we’ve ever had, just because I picked up a new Lois McMaster Bujold book for him yesterday:

ME: She’s not writing science fiction any more.
NICK: No, I know, and I find that very sad.
ME: I wonder why?
NICK: Well, I suppose fantasy is more profitable.
ME: But she can’t be short of money. I mean, she must sell the rights to everything she writes to the studios, although they’re never made into films, which I imagine she’s happy about.
NICK: I think she’s thrilled, given the draft to Warrior’s Apprentice that was floating around. All the Dendarii mercenaries had basically become space hillbillies by that point.
ME: Maybe that’s what happened to it: it became Firefly. Although you can’t imagine a much broader difference that between Captain Mal and Miles Vorkosigan. But he gets better, doesn’t he? Miles?
NICK: It takes quite a bit of brain damage and some nasty injuries.
ME: Well, it must be inconvenient, having such a damagable hero.
NICK: Oh, he doesn’t get less damagable.
ME: It’s brittle bones, isn’t it? From the gas exposure in utero?
NICK: Yep.
ME: And didn’t the gas make Cordelia infertile? I imagine that’s why Aral was persuaded into using the uterine . . . whatsits.
NICK: Replicators.
ME: Uterine replicators. Because they replicate a uterus?
NICK: Yep. Well, they’re not replicators in a Star Trek sense.
ME: Not in a Star Trek or a Stargate sense.
NICK: Well, that would be bad on both counts.
ME: I don’t know—imagine how easy having a baby would be via the Star Trek replicators: “Child. Male. Lukewarm.”

The lesson to be learned is this: there is no conversation among geeks that will not, if pursued long enough, end on a Star Trek joke.