# This week in Google Alerts: Wolfe interview & heart problems *The Urth list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 22 Mar 2011* > 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. --- ### Gwern Branwen *22 Mar 2011, 02:15* http://www.locusmag.com/Perspectives/2011/03/gene-wolfe-engineering-the-future/ Spoilers? > “The more science-fictional part of Home Fires uses war in space as a plot device. To get my heroine Chelle off-planet so I would get the time-disparity thing where she hardly ages while decades pass for people on Earth, I needed a war for her to fight. There they were, just waiting in the wings: the Os, the cyborgs. Somebody could probably grab a first-level cyborg and do some reprogramming, and wouldn’t that be interesting” Hook ?em up to a computer, and start tinkering with the software. So I have Rick Johnson, who went to West Point but has been reprogrammed as a spy for the Os. > > ??I’m told that I am a fourth-level cyborg now, because I’ve got a pacemaker. The whole thing with my heart problems just dropped into our lives like a bomb, because I had thought that for my age I was in excellent health. Then, after an echocardiagram, I found out I was actually scheduled to die within the next few months unless I had surgery! In the April-May-June quarter of 2010, I was admitted to the hospital five times. They would send me back to the nursing home and something would go wrong — off in the ambulance and back to the hospital. Riding in an ambulance got to seem normal to me, like taking a cab! (Boy, do those things jolt.)? ``` gwern http://www.gwern.net ``` ---