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Andy Robertson · 10 Feb 2002, 05:35 · from urth-v0202.mbox · original

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From: "Andy Robertson" <andywrobertson at clara.co.uk>
Date: Sun, 10 Feb 2002 05:35:57 -0000
Message-ID: <urth-v0202-120 at digest.urth.net>
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----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Andre-Driussi" <mantis at siriusfiction.com>
>
> Or is this, in fact, your larger point?  That my sticking point of the
> story, my sense that it makes no sense for Clio to kamikaze when she is
> worth more alive and in place--are you telling me that Clio is a leader
and
> yes, she is ready, willing, and finally able to kill even one corporate
> stooge with a suicide bomb?

Basically, yes.

But it is not the fact that she kills someone.  The real fight is a moral
one, like all real fights.  It is the fight to build and maintain a winning
coalition.

I am speculating here, but I believe that the rebel kamikazis are not
"pawns" but more like "saints" - epitomes of ideals that the best of
revolutionaries follow as best they can.   If they were not utterly honest,
and if their leaders were not utterly honest, the revolutionaries would fall
apart.

Part of the thick bundle of messages Clio's act carries is a message to her
own followers that they are saints, not pawns.   Clio cannot be cowed,
co-opted,  communicated with, or copulated with to any end: and she is a
*leader* of the revolutionaries.

Of course Wolfe is not pro-revolutonary.   The new revolutionary morality is
not only post-American but post-Christian and post-Catholic.   But that is
not the point.  The point is that it is a new, living, thing, - living
though alien and evil to Wolfe - displacing the old dying world.

    hartshorn

> That this, finally, is the point of transcendent evolution I have not yet
> understood?

I think you have got it :-)

--=20

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