Edith Cohn recently talked to Donald Kingsbury, mostly about his novel Courtship Rite (now available again as part of the SFBC's 50th Anniversary Collection).

Here's the first question from that interview:

EC: In Courtship Rite cannibalism is a sacred ritual and multiple marriages are the norm. What made you decide on these parameters for this world?

DK: Courtship Rite was written in the early 80's as as a prequel that takes place 500 years earlier than the events of a novel I wrote in 1972, The Finger Pointing Solward, which I didn't sell -- a revised version of which will appear from Tor real soon now when I get it finished. So the society of the planet Geta was designed for the plot of Finger. I needed a culture in which genetic engineering of the human genome was a basic premise to contrast with the people of the main galactic culture who have ethical reservations about diddling with human nature. A novel needs conflict.

At the time of Courtship Rite the expanding galactic wave of colonization has not reached Geta and so conflict between the two cultures is impossible, nor have the Getans fully developed their genetic engineering skills. So in this novel I was more interested in the roots of the Getan culture that made it what it was to become in Finger. The Getans were the survivors of a survey expedition whose starship was failing. They had to put down on a nearby planet. I made that planet, Geta, very harsh so that the preservation of biological skills and knowledge would be of primary importance. They had to be able to modify local plant and insect life to meet their needs, and they had to be able to modify the human genome if they were to adapt to an unearthly world. Thus biology, life chemistry, and evolution grew into the fundamental religion of this culture.

In the Finger I had already set up my Getans to be cannibals -- mostly because I wanted to further differentiate them from the main galactic culture for plot purposes. In Courtship Rite I had the challenge of making that believable -- which wasn't so difficult since I had arranged that the planet Geta had evolved no large meat animals, a prime condition for the emergence of cannibalism. And in the beginning of their struggle to survive there were always famines -- and cannibalism has a way of coming to the fore during episodes of famine. If you have cycles of famine, the cannibalism will get ritualized. Beside, I'm a tease at heart and I can, with a straight face, take something like the body and blood of the Eucharist and present it to my American audience in the guise of a moral code wherein the Eucharist is transformed into a religious rite that raises human embryos to be relished as sacramental delicacies.

The multiple marriages of Geta evolved for the same reason. Large families, where the individuals are extremely loyal to each other, and who all share in the raising of their children, naturally evolve under conditions of difficult survival. The Getan family, with many wives and many husbands, is only one form of such a large family but it is a very efficient one. I'm not a big fan of American serial monogamy or Muslim four-wife harems. And I am of the opinion that jealous people should confine themselves to masturbation since self-love is their primary sexual motivation.