Pinocchio vs. the Tin Man

Jerry Friedman · 25 Sep 2002, 18:01 · 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: Jerry Friedman <jerry_friedman at yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: (urth) Pinocchio vs. the Tin Man
Date: Wed, 25 Sep 2002 11:01:56 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <urth-v0209-1777 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0209/1777.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

--- Michael Andre-Driussi <mantis at siriusfiction.com> wrote:
>=20
> >Matthew Weber taunts:
> >Wouldn't Jonas be a case of exactly that?
> >
> >Crush goes for the bait:
> >Yep. He would, among others.
>=20
> I'm not sure what is going on with Jonas, what he means by his intent to
> become repaired (presumably it means he wants to become fully biological
> so
> as to be better suited for Jolenta).

Funny, that wasn't my impression at all--I thought he wanted to become
fully robotic--though he is in love or something with Jolenta.  Can we
imagine a prosthetic-bearing bio in love with a chem wanting to become
fully a chem?

> I guess it all resolves this way:
> since Severian heard the utterance and saw Jonas go into the mirror, the
> Claw heard it too, so that later on at that point in Severian's life
> when
> he really needed a friend, yet all there was at hand was a corpse, then
> the
> Claw drew down the Jonas software from the borderland between Briah and
> Yesod, installed it in the reanimated corpse, and thereby solved two
> wishes
> with one snappy miracle.

Or in possibly more sinister style, the Jonas software was hanging
around and took its opportunity.

Either way, do we see Miles going through a Silk-like recapture of his
identity?

> In any event, the transition from non-biological to biological is the
> Pinocchio scenario.

Not to mention Galatea, the Bicentennial Man, and Severian's brush-
into-squirrel dream.  Maybe above all, the amazing fact that we Homo
sapiens work by the laws of physics and consequently chemistry; we're
literally chems.

> Which is interesting because we tend to talk about
> Jonas as being the posterboy for the opposite, the Tin Man of Oz (a
> biological made non-biological).  Or Jonas as the Steadfast Tin Soldier
> (crippled; in love with a woman not of his type; swallowed by fish,
> delivered back to his first place, then cast into fiery dissolution).

Where's that from?

Thanks for the comment on _Michaelmas_, by the way.  I own that book,
but I never made any of those connections!

Jerry Friedman

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
New DSL Internet Access from SBC & Yahoo!
http://sbc.yahoo.com

--=20

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