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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Faolyn" data-source="post: 8703384" data-attributes="member: 6915329">Sorry, I should have written "bad sociology" instead of biology.If the entomoids were a monster race--even one that had a high degree of innate intelligence--then their design would be OK. But Johnson wrote that they don't live together, cooperate with each other, or care about one another at all, so it makes no sense that he also wrote that they had been able to create the same level of technology as the other spacefaring races and work together as the crew of a starship. He wrote that they'll work together to create machines, but creating a machine--at least a high-tech one--involves a lot of people living and working together to come up with the ideas in the first place, teaching and developing the science and technology needed to fulfill those ideas and how to find, create, and refine the materials needed to build the make them.In the webcoming Freefall, the alien race called the Sqid apparently also have their males and females die after mating/producing young, but in their case only a fraction of adults are fertile in the first place, and non-fertile adults raise and teach the offspring. But the Sqid's technology is at a Victorian-level, whereas the humans are spacefarers.The entomoids could have been an interesting pirate-like monster race. Say they were intelligent, fully sapient, but didn't have any sort of real culture. Humans colonize their planet. The entomoids kill them and take their stuff and figure out how to use the weapons and get off-world with the colony ships--mostly by trial and error, since they aren't going to teach each other. Then they spend the rest of their time flying around space alone and killing other people and taking their stuff so they could replace their aging and malfunctioning equipment, or hiring/enslaving others to fix it for them, because they don't have the knowledge needed to do it themselves. That could be pretty cool.</blockquote>

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