{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/1134",
    "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it.  Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.",
    "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'"
  },
  "archive": "urth",
  "thread": {
    "id": 1134,
    "subject": "Cloning and science generally in the Book",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "1998-10-07T10:12:02+00:00",
    "last": "1998-10-07T10:12:02+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0019-0057@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Peter Stephenson",
        "address": "pws at ibmth.df.unipi.it"
      },
      "date": "1998-10-07T10:12:02+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) Cloning and science generally in the Book",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Maybe this is obvious, but I don't think the phrase \"grown from the\nbody cells of exultant women\" has to imply cloning as we know it.\nNothing else is quite as we know it; I can well believe body cells\ntake on their own life on Urth.  Even being prosaic, if genetics is\n(was) sufficiently advanced there's no need why the genetic\ninformation has to be unchanged in the offspring.  On the other hand,\nthere's no reason why SBear's growth hormone shouldn't come into the\npicture.\n\nI think it's another case where deciding too definitely between\napparently distinct options doesn't really reflect the way Urth is\ndepicted --- certainly in Severian's own account, but maybe it goes\nwider.  `Science' is something a bit fluid, which can be twisted into\napparently magical, but still actually logical, shapes.  This goes for\nspace travel, black holes, drugs, pretty much everything.\n\nOr to put it another way: what we would think of as the `underlying'\nlogical explanation of something is really an emergent phenomenon in\nWolfe's writing, even if we assume (which is, I think, usually\ncorrect) that it's hiding there somewhere: the imaginative effect is\nthe fundamental one.  For example, spaceships are like sailing ships\n*apparently* because they're sailing on some cosmic wind, but\n*actually* mainly because it's a nice idea.\n\nQuite a lot of authors on the SF/fantasy border try this sort of\nthing, but it's very hard to get right; any rational explanations, if\ngiven, tend to sound silly, and they're often avoided completely so\nthat the SF element is very marginal (I'm thinking here of Colin\nGreenland's `Harm's Way', which is essentially the British Empire in\nspace).  Wolfe gets away with it partly through the deliberate\nvagueness on Severian's part as to what is actually going on (in this\nexample, as Wolfe himself points out in an appendix, he doesn't even\nbother distinguishing between seaships and spaceships).  If Wolfe had\nJack Aubrey on the quarterdeck saying `I believe we may scandalize the\ntopsheet, Mr. Pullings', much of the sense (as opposed to the real\nlogic) of an underlying scientific explanation would be lost.  There\nis, in summary, some highly creative tension between the feeling that\nthere's a logical explanation for everything, and the (deliberate)\nabsence of that explanation.\n\ncorncrake"
        },
        {
          "kind": "sig",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Peter Stephenson <pws at ibmth.df.unipi.it>       Tel: +39 050 844536\nWWW:  http://www.ifh.de/~pws/\nDipartimento di Fisica, Via Buonarotti 2, 56100 Pisa, Italy"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}