"sibyl" as in "multiple personalities"

Michael Andre-Driussi · 24 Sep 2002, 19:20 · from urth-v0209.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: Michael Andre-Driussi <mantis at siriusfiction.com>
Subject: (urth) "sibyl" as in "multiple personalities"
Date: Tue, 24 Sep 2002 12:20:16 -0700
Message-ID: <urth-v0209-1767 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0209/1767.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Now that we're plunging into the question of how many personalities are
in/make up Maytera Marble, I'm reminded of the 1970s book and tv movie
"Sibyl" that was all about the woman who had multiple personalities.
Interesting touchstone, and I wonder if influenced Gene Wolfe's notion of
Marble.

Leaving aside the complexities of Short Sun's multiple personalities, I
guess my first question would be:

Is Marble's scattered nature due to an inherent quality of her original
state, or is it due to a critical mass of recycled parts?

Because the swordmaster, for example, has a leg made from five others,
iirc, and he does not seem to show the weirdness.  Granted he is a bio, but
we are saying that Rose herself may have been influenced by her chem parts.

So is there a level of prosthetic inclusion where the items are purely
prosthetic (human level), and then a level beyond that where the
prosthetics begin to influence the individual (cyborg), up to a level where
the prosthetics either take over the individual or cause it to disintegrate
under the babble (robot)?  (This does have some bearing on the issue of
Horn as a software prosthetic for crippled Silk.)

=3Dmantis=3D

Sirius Fiction
booklets on Gene Wolfe, John Crowley
29 copies of "Snake's-hands" until OP!
http://www.siriusfiction.com/

--=20

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net