The Children of Jacinta Corr was in my mind as a story, beginning with the children having trouble appreciating poetry in Chrístõ’s classroom.

Then the news item came up about NASA sending out a broadcast of “Across The Universe” which would take something like three centuries to reach a point somewhere the other side of the galaxy. My first thought was ‘Wow. Just in time for Julia and Chrístõ to hear it!”

I had already established that Across The Universe was Chrístõ’s mother’s favourite song. It has featured in both Theta Sigma and the Marion and Kristoph stories as that. So NASA’s efforts had to get into a story at some point, and it occurred to me that, instead of some poem in the literary sense, the class could be deconstructing John Lennon’s immortal song after hearing the history of it from Chrístõ.

The idea of the children who had been educated by compute programmes, without any kind of love or affection, without any creative input, was vaguely taken from a story in one of those girls comics from the 1970s, probably the Bunty. I can’t exactly remember the outcome of the story, but the premise was teaching a girl who had been brought up that way to adjust to normal life. That much was the gist of the problem with the Corr children.

In my first thoughts about the story. Jacinta WAS going to be dead, and Chrístõ was going to being the hologram to show the children, in order to show that they DID have a mother, and that would help them to behave with more emotion. But I abandoned that in favour of their mother actually turning out to be cryogenically frozen by her husband, he having gone frankly loopy.

Now, human cloning is a hot topic these days, and many people expect it to be a reality in the future. My view of the future of humanity is that they would decide against that sort of thing eventually. Just because something can be done doesn’t mean it should be done.

The shower room scene that Julia describes to Chrístõ is possibly a bit controversial. That’s why Chrístõ very carefully tries not to visualise the scene even though the information is important.

I fixed on the name Corr, incidentally, quite late on. For most of the writing it was Corrigan, but shortening the name gave it a nicer balance. It has nothing to do with a certain Irish pop group.

http://www.acrosstheuniverseday.com/