started my second read of New Sun

Lane Haygood · 17 May 2010, 19:01 · from 2010-May.txt.gz

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From: lhaygood at gmail.com (Lane Haygood)
Date: Mon, 17 May 2010 14:01:45 -0500
Subject: (urth) started my second read of New Sun
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On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 1:41 PM, Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <danldo at gmail.com> wrote:
> While de Chardin has not been officially denounced as a heretic, severe
> "warnings" are attached to his work by the Roman Catholic Church.
>

Which has not, of course, kept Roman Catholic authors from utilizing
his philosophy and theology as the basis for their stories.

I think Wolfe, unlike Simmons, might stop short of saying that man
will surpass God as the Hieros surpassed Man.  The idea of man
creating his superior is not foreign to sf; robotics (and more
recently) genetic manipulation have produced many such stories.  The
trope of the created surpassing the creator, the student defeating the
master, etc., is a very common one.

But Wolfe (who loves to f$%! with tropes) might be stopping this one
up a bit short.  Maybe the evolution isn't so much circular as it is
spiral-shaped... ever increasing but always falling short of the true
majesty of the Increate because no matter how great the successive
lower-universe iterations get, all the way from protozoa to
Hierogrammates to angels or whatever, they are all still bounded by
temporality and being subject to this notion of change from one thing
to the other, of growth.  The very potential for change and becoming
greater necessarily acts as a self-imposed limit by making such
creatures subject to the flow of time.  The Increate, by being outside
time proper (whence a name like "Outsider?") is therefore in no danger
of ever changing or becoming "better." Such commonplace relational
notions as "better" or "worse" do not apply to such a being.

The very possibility of evolution, then, the great strength of
mortality, is also a limiting a condition that would prevent the
Teilhardian "final evolution."

LH

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