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Lee Berman wrote:
I preferred Wolfe's
explanation of how the Alzabo was a metaphor for his former mega-corp employer, Procter and Gamble. For
me that's where the true human understanding of the meaning of the text is found)
Oh, aye. We're in agreement there; I was just tweaking this whole silly argument about whether there are domes on Lune or what. What really matters is that Lune stands green in the sky as a symbol of man's past engineering glory, to which Vodalus foolishly thinks he can restore the world. It is a doubled symbol of decadance: the technological decadance that has fallen so far from the ability to do such things; and the moral decadance that said "just because we can, we should."
Agreed also that Wolfe's not going to let a hard-science difficulty stand in the way of a cool story point. (The alzabo itself is patently ridiculous on a hard-science basis, but chilling as hell as a monster and neat as a symbol of being devoured by The Machine.) But, he does take pains to make a lot of his story at least surface-plausible. (Well, maybe the alzabo isn't completely ridiculous: if it isn't a native animal of some far world, but bioengineered by humans to produce the analeptic...)
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes