Summary of the case for Silk as Typhon's clone

Gerry Quinn · 20 Jan 2011, 17:25 · from 2011-January.txt.gz

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From: gerryq at indigo.ie (Gerry Quinn)
Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2011 17:25:56 -0000
Subject: (urth) Summary of the case for Silk as Typhon's clone
References: <AANLkTik4Br9EnaM7BzcS55m=YJnLwWt_kVw0wGQf1oYp at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <A7316D77C98F4DE598B66A318A07A5BA@jill>

From: "Andrew Mason" <andrew.mason53 at googlemail.com>
Gerry Quinn wrote:

> > [--]

> For another, why is he in Viron? That actually doesn't count against
> his being a clone as such, but it does count against his being a
> super-special clone of the kind that Dan'l has in mind. I can well
> imagine that there are, possibly, clones, or, perhaps more likely,
> specially bred children of the gods scattered throughout the Whorl; It
> seems a plausible and Typhonic way of producing people of special
> abilities. But one would expect a clone destined to be the leader of
> the new colony to be kept at Mainframe.

Another point against it is that, IIRC, Tussah was reported to have paid a 
lot for the embryo.  If it was part of Typhon's plan, you'd expect Tussah to 
be paid, or to do it out of loyalty or just obedience.  You wouldn't expect 
him to pay.

> >> Typhon is psychically adept in some way. And he isn't willing to have
> >> his consciousness downloaded into another (such as Piaton), though the
> >> technology is clearly available to him.
> >
> > He has charisma, aggression and self-confidence, that is certain. I'm 
> > not
> > convinced his powers extend to the supernatural.
>
> He manages to get Severian to see things at an impossible distance, in
> a way that implies psychic power. (I'm not sure Wolfe would consider
> this supernatural, though. He refers to Silk's psychic powers in an
> interview somewhere in a very casual way, which suggests to me  that
> he thinks such powers are actually part of the world.)

True - I kind of assumed there was soime technological enhancement of vision 
built into the window, but the text doesn't really seem to support this. 
(On the other hand, who knows what the ancient super-science was truly 
capable of?)

> > As for downloading, it could be that Wolfe hadn't considered that option
> > when he wrote BotNS.
>
> Almost certainly,. But in the light of BOTLS, we can look back and
> ask how to make sense of what happens in BOTNS given this new
> information (make sense of it in-story, not make sense of Wolfe's
> writing it).

We travel murky paths when we take that route.  The problem is that there is 
no reason to believe that anything else in the text will correlate with such 
ideas; and if the author actually intended something relating to a point we 
deal with this way, we will actually tend to obscure it.

- Gerry Quinn

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