urth Digest, Vol 26, Issue 12

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes · 16 Oct 2006, 19:38 · from 2006-October.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: danldo at gmail.com (Dan'l Danehy-Oakes)
Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2006 12:38:45 -0700
Subject: (urth) urth Digest, Vol 26, Issue 12
In-Reply-To: <3B2AB615-41AD-4B46-B31A-485515ED6B37 at ou.edu>
References: <mailman.78679.1161018924.570.urth-urth.net at lists.urth.net>
	<3B2AB615-41AD-4B46-B31A-485515ED6B37 at ou.edu>
Message-ID: <1f7617370610161238td456e23hfe8ecd00c2db3230 at mail.gmail.com>

I'll add: I think it's significant that the sacrificial victim was a girl
-- innocent or otherwise. There's a strong violence-against-women
quotient in Wolfe's work, and over time it's begun to disturb me
a bit. In this particular case, it's pretty egregious.

--Dan'l

On 10/16/06, Kieran Mullen <kieran at ou.edu> wrote:
> >
> > ------------------------------
> >
> > Message: 9
> > Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2006 13:00:27 -0400
> > From: Daniel D Jones <ddjones at riddlemaster.org>
> > Subject: Re: (urth) The Death of Doctor Island Movie
> > To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
> > Message-ID: <200610161300.28204.ddjones at riddlemaster.org>
> > Content-Type: text/plain;  charset="iso-8859-1"
> >
> > On Monday 16 October 2006 12:55, David DiGiacomo wrote:
> >>> I always thought that the trio of IDD, DrOfDI, and DofDrI was the
> >>> most
> >>> accessible and visual of GWs works and would make an facinating
> >>> triptych
> >>> of short films. Hopefully this will not be awful and they'll make
> >>> two
> >>> more.
> >>
> >> I agree that The Death of Doctor Island is accessible in terms of
> >> understanding the plot, but I also find it to be one of Wolfe's most
> >> disturbing and offensive stories.  I can't imagine what a mass
> >> audience
> >> would make of it.
> >
> > Care to expound on why you find it offensive?
> >
>
>
> I am not David, but I can write why I find the story disturbing:  an
> innocent young girl is brutally murdered in order to salvage one
> mentally disturbed adult male,  drive an innocent boy catatonic,  and
> manifest the more useful subdominant personality in the boy.   This
> is all based on some utilitarian calculus:  the low probability that
> the girl will be cured, the preference for the subdominant
> personality in the boy, the chance that the man will be cured.   It's
> the cold sacrifice of one life to improve another's life.    But I
> think that's the type of death offered by Doctor Island, and this is
> the point of the story.
>
> What if the Island is wrong in its prognosis?    Is that much worse
> than its being right?
>
> I'm not sure I'd call that offensive, but it is disturbing to me.
>
> Kieran Mullen
>
>
> P.S.  It's been a while since I read the story.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Urth Mailing List
> To post, write urth at urth.net
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>


-- 
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes, writer, trainer, bon vivant
-----
http://www.livejournal.com/users/sturgeonslawyer
http://www.danehyoakes.com
Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open
sewer and die.
  - Mel Brooks

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net