interview questions

Dave Muir-Bacon · 06 Jan 2011, 16:18 · from 2011-January.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: dave.muir-bacon at tracegroup.com (Dave Muir-Bacon)
Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2011 16:18:52 -0000
Subject: (urth) interview questions
In-Reply-To: <SNT123-W313C40B93C9724B6FA28F6CF0A0 at phx.gbl>
References: <SNT123-W313C40B93C9724B6FA28F6CF0A0 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <E6B6B0C272A4E74385ED136B08FDAF3502B2CD77 at timail.isys.tracegroup.com>

I'm enjoying the on-going discussion of Cerberus (sorry, 5HoC) having
recently reread it, but could somebody please post a link to the
original "interview" that prompted these questions?

I realise I could probably find it by looking back through the archives
but that might be a slow process.

Thanks
Dave M-B

-----Original Message-----
From: urth-bounces at lists.urth.net [mailto:urth-bounces at lists.urth.net]
On Behalf Of Lee Berman
Sent: 06 January 2011 14:10
To: urth at lists.urth.net
Subject: (urth) interview questions

The elephant in the room for me still remains: Veil's Hypothesis. Gerry
has used some rather colorful adjectives to describe his opinion of its
veracity and those who might consider its veracity. I'm wondering,
Gerry, has the ongoing discussion opened things up any for you?  

Borski devoted a chapter of Long and Short of It to this issue, with the
premise that Veil's Hypothesis must be considered as a possible
conclusion. Some of his evidence involves the appearance of lingering
shapeshifting in characters we would expect to rule out from being abos.
I haven't seen Borski state it explicitly but I suspect he tends to
agree with my assessment of anti-Occam as a guiding principle when it
comes to understanding Wolfe.

Somewhere in the text of 5HoC is the explication of a certain
engineering priniciple or process; something about finding the heat
distribution in irregular objects by a series of closer and closer
approximations, iirc.

For me this is second only to Veil's Hypothesis as a key to explaining
what is really going on in these two planets. I think it is a mistake to
get stuck on a single example of replacement, green eyes, tool use
issues etc. and assume that's all there is.

Surely the human body, brain and psyche are irregular objects. I detect
a subtext which implies that the imitation process is not a single
event, but ongoing, with progressively closer approximations of perfect
imitation. This subtext is subtle and vague.  By contrast, Veil's
Hypothesis is so jarring a hammerblow that it leaves us stunned and
mostly unable to detect the other fine-grained hints without multiple
readings. (GRW you devious bastard!)

That is one of the purposes of "A Story". In Shadow Children we are
shown a very poor approximation of humanity. They can't be shown in the
main text of the story because they would ruin the earthian,
frenchy-colonial ambience Wolfe has established for St. Croix. But we
NEED to see them to see the earlier stages of imitation/approximation
which have been almost perfected in the main text characters we see.

This idea resonates with a certain recurring principle in Wolfe's work.
Lamarckian evolution. Wolfe may even have mentioned this term in an
interview but I'm not sure. Back when 5HoC was written, the Central
Dogma of Biology was the overwhelmingly domininant perspective. I can
guess Wolfe is pleased with research in the past 25 years suggesing the
occasional reversal of  Central Dogma and the environment feeding back
to the organism and enacting permanent genetic changes within it, during

the lifetime of the organism. 		 	   		  
_______________________________________________
Urth Mailing List
To post, write urth at urth.net
Subscription/information: http://www.urth.netDisclaimer: 

The contents of this E-mail plus any attachment is intended for the use of the 
addressee only and is confidential, proprietary and may be privileged. It will not be 
binding upon Trace Group or any group company (Trace).  Opinions, conclusions, 
contractual obligations and other information in this message in so far as they relate to 
the official business of Trace must be specifically confirmed in writing by Trace. If you 
are not the intended recipient you must not copy this message or attachment, use or 
disclose the contents to any other person, but are requested to telephone or E-mail 
the sender and delete the message and any attachment from your system. Trace 
takes all reasonable precautions to ensure that no virus or defect is transmitted via 
this e mail, however Trace accepts no responsibility for any virus or defect that might 
arise from opening this E-mail or attachments.

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