more MANSEED spoilers
The Whorl list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 07 Sep 1999
https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/whorl/623

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.

==============================================================================

Michael Andre-Driussi — 07 Sep 1999, 07:42

SPOILERS!

> (The Defenders have genitals which serve them as pleasure organs, but not
> as organs of elimination, nor procreation.  Which is kinda sorta weird, to
> give your robots.  And another problem: the whole idea of the clones)

Thus the text breaks off in mid-thought.  Here's the rest:

The whole idea of the clones is based upon the seed analogy: that genetic
material can be activated and grown (in this case into adulthood in 30
days). Thus the ship carries a gallon of this and a gallon of that and
grows the comparitively very bulky 40 colonists at the site.

Ah, but robots are not grown from seeds (then again, there was that
children's fantasy, was it Narnia or Oz, where the boy planted a bolt in
the Otherwhere and the next time he came to that spot, a lamp post had
grown).  This aspect is covered in the text: there is only enough material
for three defenders to be created by the ship.  But still, those parts are
going to weigh something . . . then again, the defenders seem to be "grown"
more than simply "assembled"; furthermore, the same womb that grows the
defenders also grows the first colonists . . . it is murky as to how this
might work; within the story it is simply given.

=mantis=



*This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------