5HC: Is the Wolfe line necessarily doomed to failure? The Urth list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 19 Apr 2002 https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/3178 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. ============================================================================== Dan'l Danehy-Oakes — 19 Apr 2002, 22:50 I'm not sure what this means, but it appears that Number Five does something no previous Gene Wolfe has done. In the conversation in which he discoveres the nature of Mr. Million, this happens (Ace ed'n, p45): [Mr. Million] paused agian, and for an instant his face dissolved into myriad sparkling dots, swirling like dust motes in a sunbeam. "I am sorry. For once you wish to listen but I do not wish to lecture. I was told, a long time ago, just before the operation, that my simulation - this - would be capable of emotion in certain circumstances. Until today I had always thought they lied." Okay, I freely admit that I'm not sure what this is about. The preceding conversation is all about what Mr. Million is. Is it possible that no preceding generation has _asked_? Or... At any rate, it appears that _something_ has happened here that did not happen with the previous GW clones. Does this imply that the GWs can evolve after all? (After all, the real GW believes in some "heretical" ideas about inheriting acquired characteristics.) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------