Aside from it being biologically impossible to repopulate from a single couple, it was not really portrayed ambiguously. I don't care to reread it, but from what I remember, the main protagonist was the driving force behind it, grooms her own (single-digit-age?) daughter into the idea, who then sleeps with her own father in graphic detail. He is a little hesitant at first, but relents almost immediately, and this is implied to be a good thing. Cue decades of continued child-incest and inbreeding.
Putting the characters in that situation and resolving it the explicit way he did was a deliberate choice the author makes -- it didn't have to be that way.
— Spoilers, if you’ve not read this and yet are still reading this comment chain
I guess the grooming may start earlier, it’s not really discussed and it’s a bit ambiguous as to when that started
> but relents almost immediately,
Physically, at the time, though this is something they’ve argued about for 6 years.
It’s not a passage I particularly care for, and it could have been less explicit but then I’m mixed on how that would change the story. I’ve just finished it and it’s certainly an interesting sci-fi story.
Does it provide a strange contrast to the other things?
There’s disgusting horrors inflicted by terrible people but to the willing (but are they only willing due to what was done to them before, by PI?).
Deliberate and horrible suffering of a single person caused for minor gain.
There’s calm destruction of trillions, unfeeling, for protection out of a measure of harms and trying to protect one set. There’s the good goal or perhaps just self indulgent goal that led to that too.
There’s the deliberate killing of trillions with glee at breaking things for one persons view of humanity. There’s the deliberate doing of this by the original catalyst, but with less clear direction. Perhaps a lack of logic and more boredom?
And yet this, done for improving survival chances of a group, feels over the line. I don’t disagree that it is quite disgusting but I do find it interesting at that being my reaction given what else has been done up to this point.
I take your point, but for me at least the disgust is more in the way the different situations are used (and characterized) by the author.
Freezing all alien life is obviously horrifying, and Caroline says as much. It's not as bad as genocide but is treated as nearly as bad.
Flipping the table on Cyberspace is more ambiguous -- it might free those other species on the one hand, but might destroy all life on the other. Lawrence is far more resistant here (though he does eventually relent). But at least in this case the dilemma serves to hammer home the central point of the story: that life is given meaning by challenge and striving and that removing all limits is the existential equivalent of mainlining heroin. It's a provocative idea, but there's at least a point to it.
The incest stuff, though, is completely unnecessary. There's no reason why breaking Prime Intellect would result in the two of them (and only the two of them) existing in an empty world. It's a totally artificial scenario, seemingly contrived to set up an excuse for endless incest, even though that wouldn't work biologically. It might make sense if there were some sort purpose for it, or if it were treated as a horrifying dilemma. But he portrays it as this sweetly innocent thing that is primal and right, and it's shown to work flawlessly to set up a harmonious and healthy society superior to both the old world and what Prime Intellect built.
Again, I love most of the story and revisit it every few years, but this ending is thinly-veiled fetish gratification with no redeeming value.
Aside from it being biologically impossible to repopulate from a single couple, it was not really portrayed ambiguously. I don't care to reread it, but from what I remember, the main protagonist was the driving force behind it, grooms her own (single-digit-age?) daughter into the idea, who then sleeps with her own father in graphic detail. He is a little hesitant at first, but relents almost immediately, and this is implied to be a good thing. Cue decades of continued child-incest and inbreeding.
Putting the characters in that situation and resolving it the explicit way he did was a deliberate choice the author makes -- it didn't have to be that way.