Metamorphs

The third "Harvest of Stars" novel, Harvest The Fire, reveals more about "metamorphs." Here, the word means not shape changers but beings with modified genomes.

In particular, "Intellects" are human beings whose ancestors were modified for a brainpower that has subsequently been made obsolete by computers but, like other metamorphs, they continue to breed although their kind no longer has any place in society. Hence, disaffection and alienation.

One Intellect, intelligent enough, and also intellectually intrigued enough, to hack into state secrets of the cybercosm, is hired to do so by Lunarians, another group of metamorphs who are adapted to live and breed in lunar gravity and thus are also able to colonise the asteroids but are discouraged from such interplanetary expansionism by the cybercosm which wants to robotize, then phase out, space travel.

Anderson imagined conflicts of interest in future societies which, having transcended our current political and economic differences, then find new issues to fight about! The Intellects must have intellectual/mental/computational abilities comparable to those of Frank Herbert's "Mentats" who, far from being made obsolete by computers were, on the contrary, bred to replace computers that had been destroyed in a Jihad: similar beings but with an opposite origin.