Stargate Atlantis Legacy: The Furies
SGA #19
ISBN: 9781905586578
And we are back!
I’d like to talk about Wraith babies, as promised from last week, but also about relationships and taboos and such in general concerning the Wraith.
No doubt, considering a later book, I’ll do another Wraith relationship one later on, but for now ‘The Furies’ has some interesting pieces in it to explore.
I haven’t watched all of the deleted scenes or behind the scenes stuff so it’s possible some of my curiosity will be assuaged once I do. Now, however, I have theories and questions and observations.
Of course, it’s entirely possible the answers are in the books I just didn’t see it the first time.
In any case.
A conversation between Guide and Keller got me thinking about it because something he said seemed strange to me.
It’s been mentioned that Wraith babies grow within wombs on the ship, I’m guessing it’s not too different from an incubation chamber you’d see in a sci-fi movie, and so I thought that the Wraith didn’t actually procreate like humans did but used genetic engineering.
Seems logical right? It’s what they do for the Drones after all and we know that the majority of the Wraith males were bred specifically for certain traits during the war.
I am now of the thought that this is not true.
Guide tells Keller that he had sired a daughter once. Apparently to be chosen to sire a child at all was a great honor and then, in his mind, he was derisive about humans for not having a care in their choosing when it came to such things.
So, I’m going to say that the Wraith still do the whole ‘breeding for certain traits’ thing. It might just be a holdover from the war years or it could be that the Queens are simply selective, naturally, about such things in the hopes they have a daughter.
Not necessarily a bad thing, humans do the same to a certain extent.
Now, I’m guessing that at a point after conception the fetus is moved into the shipwomb to grow until, apparently, it’s time for them to be weaned.
We saw in the episode where Guide and his crew had cancer from the retrovirus, that their hibernation chambers feed them nutrients and such while they sleep (pretty sure it’s been stated or insinuated in any case). It’s not a stretch at all to understand that a shipwomb for babies would do the same.
It’s interesting to think about because if the Wraith procreate like humans do than they can also, presumably, carry to term.
So why don’t they?
Guide, while thinking about this during the conversation with Keller, also thinks about the fact that the babies in the shipwomb ‘learn’ from the constant hum of the hive.
I’ll go out on the limb here and say he doesn’t mean the ship itself, but the Wraith as a whole on whichever hive the baby is on.
Then again, it could also literally be that the baby learns from the ship until the point that the baby can learn in a more traditional manner.
I’m going to stop here cause this has gotten long.
Until later!
The Dark Library 