fifth head owlet- wolf

DAVID STOCKHOFF · 10 Apr 2013, 18:41 · from 2013-April.txt.gz

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From: dstockhoff at verizon.net (DAVID STOCKHOFF)
Date: Wed, 10 Apr 2013 11:41:12 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: (urth) fifth head owlet- wolf
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>________________________________
> From: Marc Aramini <marcaramini at yahoo.com>
>To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net> 
>Sent: Wednesday, April 10, 2013 11:51 AM
>Subject: Re: (urth) fifth head owlet- wolf
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>People, no matter what they become, will still have free will.? I am of the opinion that the trees and the lianas are all that is left of man, echoes of him in a time when he has changed so much as to be no longer human, but instead "vanished people".? Both species are good or bad because they are people, who are good and bad both, though one is more debased and further from a transcendental truth - the parasites - though both are ultimately descended from man and his "climbing up the tree" referenced by Quetzal - he just hasn't climbed down yet.
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>Along the lines of my Wolfean thought experiment about Eden: one solution is for beings to become incorporeal so that they do not need to process calories. This is of course an SF cliche; a version of it can be seen in the race Severian postulates who ascended to a higher plane, as well as the vanishing Neighbors. 
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>What happens to the parasites of a super-evolved species? Do they evolve too? Think of head and crotch lice, which evolved into separate species when human body hair almost disappeared. Think also of dogs, which had already evolved to understand speech by the time we started building structures with out hands. If we become gods, will our parasites become dragons? Will dogs and cats become humans in our place?
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>Is "climbing up the tree" actually climbing back up the tree? Is ascension also return? Consider the humans Severian describes who have lobotomies and go back to the forest. I always took that as a pulpy aside---but I think it's actually a key idea for Wolfe. 
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>Our ancestors lived in trees before they were remotely human, and evolved like any animal. Long after they took to the ground, they began to acquire animal servants. There's a period of at least 50,000 years during which all domesticated crops and animals appeared. The biblical Eden featured human "mastery" of all the animals but I find that model no more workable than vegetarian lions; instead, our environment adapted to us. As Wolfe observes in Island of Doctor Death ..., we like when the world responds to our thoughts and emotions. But conscious human control is a nightmare.
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