Silk's origin

Andrew Mason · 12 Oct 2011, 21:11 · from 2011-October.txt.gz

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From: andrew.mason53 at googlemail.com (Andrew Mason)
Date: Wed, 12 Oct 2011 22:11:38 +0100
Subject: (urth) Silk's origin
Message-ID: <CAM3O41LG+ogrJdhmT-v+n4+gP0Z6aDRPGHe3E8atyZ8CZEtRxQ at mail.gmail.com>

James Wynn wrote:

>
> And it is troublesome in what sense Tussah considered himself Silk's
> "father". If they ever met, Silk didn't remember it--only having seen a
> bust of him in a closet. Tussah never married Silk's mother, and he
> never officially adopted Silk.

Well, the other inhabitants of Viron don't seem to have had a problem
with it. When Tussah died, leaving the message that 'my son, not of my
body, will succeed me', they set out to look for this 'adopted son'.
The fact that Tussah wasn't married and had no child living with him
didn't worry them. So I'm guessing adoption in Viron is a legal rather
than a familial matter. We don't know there was no legal adoption -
the papers would presumably be hidden somewhere.

>
>> Moreover, we are told in a couple of places that the embryos are the
>> result of selective breeding, rather than clones.
>
> I missed that. What are you referring to?

There's something in RTTW, isn't there, which refers to carefully
controlled matings in Typhon's workshops? And Crane's remake about the
Petri dish fits in with this. Of course, this doesn't prevent a few
clones being slipped in among them, but I think the presumption should
be that they are selectively bred rather than cloned.

.
 If Typhon is
> one of the fathers, he didn't *die* on the Whorl.

That may not matter if the vision isn't from Mainframe, but from the
Outsider. On the other hand, that produces a new problem, in that
Typhon, one would think, is not the sort of person the Outsider would
choose as a messenger.

>
> However, I'll note that Silk doesn't really describe the second father
> (which is reasonable since the account is written by Horn after all,
> anyway). Wolfe has this style of having a person say something, then
> breaking the paragraph, and having the same person say something else.
> It's quite jarring. Silk's father does that (I think) and so readers
> generally assume that both the fathers speak to Silk. I don't think they
> do. I think only one does, and I find that interesting.

While we aren't forced to think that both fathers speak, it seems
likely to me that they do, since it's specifically said that one of
the mothers does not speak, suggesting that the other three parents
all do.

>

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