How can you write about how humans are evolving or giving birth to our successors without writing about sex? Yet, I nearly did just that, this being another very late addition to the collection.

Who wouldn't want to experience sex as a member of the opposite sex? Or perhaps as someone in between? Or perhaps as another creature? Or an entirely new type of entity(ies)?

I do remember the Ursula LeGuin novel Left Hand of Darkness, which dealt with a more flexible sexuality, the ability to be either male or female.

The cover for Begat is an image by photographer Cedric Blanchon (used by kind permission) and I'm quite taken by his images, and I was surprised to find he had the same sort of preoccupations as I have.

One in particular,called Blowjob 2.0 struck a chord in me and reminded me of the movie Brainstorm starring Natalie Wood and Christopher Walken, and the Michael Crichton novel Terminal Man, both of which cover similar territory.

I was also influenced by a video interview of Ray Kurzweil on Youtube where he talked about being able to experience gender differences in virtual environments in the future. It seems that sex will be radically changed/expanded in the future, or perhaps eliminated entirely, but either way I wanted to talk about this.

And instead of an artificial intelligence(s) needing to eliminate humanity perhaps it would simply pacify us, which reminded me of the Cat Stevens song Peace Train, which I read once was about orgasms (must be true if I read it on the net).

So I put all these ideas in a pot, stirred well, put them in an oven until they were half baked and out popped this delicious concoction called Mindjob.