Editing Ed's World (section)

== Ed's World ==

=== Aquila 140 D 330 412 A Desert, Non Industrial, Poor ===

Ed's World is named for Edwina Campbell, an ultra-feminist biotechnologist who dreamed of making a world without men. And with the right tech, she reckoned she could and would do just that, though the results haven't been wildly successful. Ed's World is inhabited by 60 000 people of mostly female sexual characteristics, though more than a few are to some degree hermaphrodites. Edwina started cloning at first, then got onto a method of combining eggs in the lab so as to create an embryo with two female parents. Many minor genetic faults were introduced at this stage, and persist on Ed's World - albinism is relatively common, as are a couple of even worse mutations - and the low initial population of under a hundred led to more problems.

Initial work in parthenogensis was a disaster, the people created were mostly haploid and prone to all kinds of problems, and at this point the UN stepped in. Though distant and theoretically a sovereign state, Ed's World was invaded on the grounds of massive human rights violations - no one could do experiments with such a massive failure rate on humans, and that was that. The occupying force is still there a century later, few new colonists, and almost no men, have settled here, and the experiments continue in a more careful and measured way. Edwina's successors give diverse accounts of what refinement of human biology they are currently aiming for, and their stated method of reproduction of their people - egg-mixing from within their own population - quite patently isn't true, as the genetic diversity of the population remains high and may be getting higher.

Male visitors find Ed's World disturbing, though the locals are friendly and polite enough, they ban men from going beyond a certain underground city near the spaceport, and off world women from going beyond a settlement a few kilometres beyond that. These are grim places by most standards, rough tunnels and sealed surface habitats with a low standard of living.

They do have a discreet genetic hospital where they make money from rich people who want their DNA 'improved' or have embryo selection done, however frowned upon this may be on their homeworlds, though they do not do germline modification. Further cash is donated from less extreme feminist movements on other worlds, and rumour has it, various corporations and governments who contract out their dodgier experiments to the local experts. The planet has few resources otherwise,  TL for genetics and medicine is effectively 12.