Pike's ghost

Larry Miller · 29 Nov 2011, 11:46 · from 2011-November.txt.gz

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From: decanus1284 at gmail.com (Larry Miller)
Date: Tue, 29 Nov 2011 06:46:51 -0500
Subject: (urth) Pike's ghost
In-Reply-To: <SNT123-W67AD0CB4BFD6D632EECA6CFB30 at phx.gbl>
References: <SNT123-W67AD0CB4BFD6D632EECA6CFB30 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <CADQR0GoBnQ-mqj_z4qxazoAC3WVjBgkqA8rv_gk9KEtzwUEx=w at mail.gmail.com>

Funny that you bring up the D. Void books as I always saw quite a bit
of them in Long/Short Sun.  The second Dune trilogy is by far better
than the first.

On 11/28/11, Lee Berman <severiansola at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>>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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