Pinocchio vs. the Tin Man

I'm not sure what is going on with Jonas, what he means by his intent to become repaired (presumably it means he wants to become fully biological so as to be better suited for Jolenta). I guess it all resolves this way: since Severian heard the utterance and saw Jonas go into the mirror, the Claw heard it too, so that later on at that point in Severian's life when he really needed a friend, yet all there was at hand was a corpse, then the Claw drew down the Jonas software from the borderland between Briah and Yesod, installed it in the reanimated corpse, and thereby solved two wishes with one snappy miracle. In any event, the transition from non-biological to biological is the Pinocchio scenario. Which is interesting because we tend to talk about Jonas as being the posterboy for the opposite, the Tin Man of Oz (a biological made non-biological). Or Jonas as the Steadfast Tin Soldier (crippled; in love with a woman not of his type; swallowed by fish, delivered back to his first place, then cast into fiery dissolution). =mantis= Sirius Fiction booklets on Gene Wolfe, John Crowley 29 copies of "Snake's-hands" until OP! http://www.siriusfiction.com/

Funny, that wasn't my impression at all--I thought he wanted to become fully robotic--though he is in love or something with Jolenta. Can we imagine a prosthetic-bearing bio in love with a chem wanting to become fully a chem?

Or in possibly more sinister style, the Jonas software was hanging around and took its opportunity. Either way, do we see Miles going through a Silk-like recapture of his identity?

Not to mention Galatea, the Bicentennial Man, and Severian's brush- into-squirrel dream. Maybe above all, the amazing fact that we Homo sapiens work by the laws of physics and consequently chemistry; we're literally chems.

Where's that from? Thanks for the comment on Michaelmas, by the way. I own that book, but I never made any of those connections! Jerry Friedman

Jerry Friedman quoting mantis:

I agree completely with Jerry and have said so before. Jonas loathed his bio replacement parts. When he said he would come back for Jolenta when he had been repaired, when he was sane and whole, he meant when proper repairs had been made and he was quit of his bio parts. The proof is on the last page of chapter XVI of CLAW: ------------- "We crashed. It had been so long, on Urth, that there was no port when we returned, no dock. Afterward my hand was gone, and my face. My shipmates repaired me as well as they could, but there were no parts anymore, only biological material." With the steel hand I had always thought scarcely more than a hook, he picked up the hand of muscle and bone as a man might lift a bit of filth to cast it away." ------------ All the more reason to wonder what he wanted with Jolenta. -Roy

Jerry Friedman wrote: Can we imagine a prosthetic-bearing bio in love with a chem wanting to become fully a chem? Response: It is not a two-way street. It is the most natural of inclinations to prefer things that are more authentic; to want to BE more authentic. Religious apologist have declared in once sense or another that the proper urge to worship the Divine comes from the knowledge that we are made in his image. By the same token, Pinocchio, the Tin Man, and Data (of Star Trek) all want to become "real" not just the semblance of reality. Lemur disparaged the Mainframe gods as "ghosts" not because he believed in life after death but because he didn't - he would assert that they (and also himself, to his own dismay) were only a semblance of the "real" persons - actually Kypris suggests this understanding of herself as well. So it IS logical that a chem would want to become human. It is NOT logical that a god would. The reasons for Jonas' disparagement of human parts and Potto's talus' revulsion toward human "filth" are another subject but it's not hard to see why they might feel that way even if they would become human if given the opportunity - and that one of the parallels is people who scorn "holy" relics. Still, there IS Mr. Million (5HoC) who chose (with regret) to become a robot. -- Crush

Forget about the in love part, I think there are plenty of people who would choose a super-strong, nigh-immortal robot body over a frail biological one, even if one had to give up various human pleasures and expereiences. Greg Egan's Diaspora imagines a future in which some people are bio-modified, some are downloaded into and live in various "Mainframes," and some live with their minds downloaded into robot bodies. So yes, some of us can imagine it. -- M.