Pike's ghost

Lee Berman · 29 Nov 2011, 03:01 · from 2011-November.txt.gz

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From: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee Berman)
Date: Mon, 28 Nov 2011 22:01:25 -0500
Subject: (urth) Pike's ghost
Message-ID: <SNT123-W67AD0CB4BFD6D632EECA6CFB30 at phx.gbl>

>Jerry Friedman: >> So this may be saying that someone has taken a mandrake root 

>and humanized it, creating a homunculus.

It might. But mandrake and mandragora are essentially the same word, "drake" being

another word for dragon.

I guess it might be a difference in reading preference. Is a Wolfe book to be read

as a random sequence of colorful episodes which have no connection to each other? I

don't see it that way.

If a random someone has grown a fetus from a plant root for no apparent reason, I 

can't see that as a more interesting interpretation than one which explains who

created that fetus and for what purpose. As larry says, mandrake and Mandragora both 

point to Typhon (as homunculus ties to Dr. Talos, but we won't complicate the matter 

with that, for now).

>larry miller: The question is who that someone is.
>Typhon is a logical choice.  By the way the Axolotl Tanks are revealed
>to be the bodies of Tleilaxu females so the vats are wombs. Sorry big
>Dune fan so I had to chime in on that.

Dune fan here also. I am one of the few who likes the second trilogy better than the

first (I consider Dune books 4, 5 and 6 to be more WOlfe-like, actually). Book 6 was a

fantastic finale. (it should have ended there; I find the Frank Herbert-post-mortem Dune 

books to be unreadable even if his son wrote them. Same for Brian Herbert's attempt to 

continue the D.Void-Jesus Incident series.)

Anyway, I also agree with larry. The revelation that the clinical Tleilaxu "vats" are

really gigantic, decapitated females is presented as a high point of horror in the 

series. They not only produce facedancers and clones with these giant uteri, they also 

engineer them to produce volumes of melange spice by the ton-lot. Ugh.

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