{ "export": { "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/1913", "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": 1913, "subject": "Planarian Worms", "messages": 1, "voices": 1, "first": "1999-11-03T17:05:57+00:00", "last": "1999-11-03T17:05:57+00:00" }, "messages": [ { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "Dan Parmenter", "address": "dan at lec.com" }, "date": "1999-11-03T17:05:57+00:00", "subject": "(urth) Planarian Worms", "in_reply_to": null, "reply_link": null, "blocks": [ { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "From: Paul C Duggan \nthe memories contained in a single cell certainly doesn't have a\nscientific basis. There was some speculation about rna-memory\ntransfer (based on statiticly invalid samples) from planarians fed other\nplanarians who had learned to do t-mazes did the t-maes faster than other\nplanarians.\n\nLarry Niven made alot out of this memory-rna transfer schtick in his\nstories, but AFAIK, its a scientific dead end." }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "This was also one of Alan Moore's earliest conceits in his stint on\nSWAMP THING. Before Moore took over, the essential premise of the\ncharacter was that he was a man transformed into a plant being. By\nmeans of the Planarian Principle we discover that the Swamp Thing was\nactually consumed and replaced by a plant being, complete with the\nmemories of his predecessor.\n\nI had been meaning to bring up Moore again for a few reasons actually.\nRegarding Wolfe's lack of popularity among \"mainstream\" AND \"SF\"\nreaders, it occured to me that despite the similar approaches of Moore\nand Wolfe at some level (taking tired genre cliches and doing\ninteresting things with them and indeed, making you fall in love with\nthe cliches themselves all over again), Moore, unlike Wolfe was very\npopular and did in fact win over both non-comics fans and comics fans.\nIndeed, Moore became one of a small number of celebrity comics writers\n(Art Spiegelman and Frank Miller who both also achieved a lot of fame\nat around the same time Moore did were rather significantly\nwriter-artists rather than pure writers). So is WATCHMEN simply more\n\"accessible\" than BOTNS? Perhaps it is, although in its own way it is\nevery bit as obscure as Wolfe with lots of symbolism (\"everything\nmeans something, but not everything means much\" was the quotation),\nimportant information dropped casually in odd places (each issue of\nthe series included text pieces that illuminated the world of the\nWATCHMEN: excerpts from books mentioned in the comic itself, spurious\nPLAYBOY interviews with Ozymandias etc.) and other \"lupine\" touches.\nIn short, I think there's a lot of basis for comparison. But for\nwhatever reason, WATCHMEN really doesn't alienate readers the way\nBOTNS seems to. The \"genre\" parts of it are so good by themselves (a\ncontrived superhero pastiche with a plot device lifted from an OUTER\nLIMITS episode, for the record) that even if a reader ignores a lot of\nthe really interesting details (some readers have told me that they\nskipped the text pieces and the \"comic within a comic\" TALES OF THE\nBLACK FREIGHTER), you can \"get\" the essence of it. I would have\nthought that this was the case with BOTNS too (I first read it at age\n16 and loved it but missed a lot) since it really does deliver on the\n\"genre\" goods (plenty of fight scenes, a cool sword, lots of sex, an\nappealing \"world\") but perhaps with Wolfe there's simply too much of\nthat feeling that one has missed something.\n\nRe: Wolfe and Moore and the place of \"genre\" writers in \"literature\"\n\nOne other thing I thought I'd mention: I've been re-reading a lot of\nMoore (and reading his first novel, THE VOICE OF FIRE for the first\ntime, more on this in later posts) and it occurs to me that if his\nstuff does survive and enter the \"canon\" of \"real literature,\" it will\nnot only serve to keep his stuff alive, but in the cases of his \"pure\ngenre\" stuff he may also ensure that a lot of less-worthy stuff, the\nvery genre cliches that he revels in, will also make it into the canon\nsimply by dint of the fact that these were the things he wrote about.\nFor example, Moore wrote exactly four Superman stories. Each of them\nmakes extensive use of the \"Superman mythos\" that DC largely\njettisoned when they did their \"revamping\" of the character in the\nmid-eighties (e.g. Krypto the supergdog, the Bizarro world, things\nlike that). Moore included these things because he loved them, but he\nalso made them come alive and seem incredibly interesting and even\npoetic (any writer who can make me cry with a scene involving Krypto\nthe superdog AND the Legion of Super-Heroes is pretty skilled IMO).\nSo perhaps someday when no one writes about superheroes any more, Alan\nMoore's vision of them will be the one that people remember and the\none that shows people why anyone would ever want to write about such\nthings in the first place. To make a highfalutin (and perhaps overly\npat) literary comparison, when we study Shakespeare's plays we learn\nthat some of them (e.g. Romeo and Juliet) were based on existing\nstories/plays of the time, but it's the Shakespeare version we're\nreading. His is the version that survived.\n\nAnd so it may be with Wolfe. When the time comes (if it ever does)\nwhen no one writes about robots, spaceships, time travel,\nsword-wielding barbarians and dying earths, Wolfe's vision of those\nthings may be the only one that future readers are aware of. So in a\nsense, writers like Wolfe and Moore become literary guardians of their\ngenres, not just examplars of them.\n\nLex(icographer) Shellac\n\naka\n\nDan Parmenter" } ] } ] }