Clones of the Long Sun

James Wynn · 06 Sep 2003, 19:07 · from urth-v0309.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: "James Wynn" <crushtv at hotpop.com>
Subject: Re: (urth) Clones of the Long Sun
Date: Sat, 6 Sep 2003 14:07:23 -0500
Message-ID: <urth-v0309-4040 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0309/4040.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

As I see it, the chief benefit of the Typhon Clone explanation originally
put forward by Don is the number of narrative puzzles it answers, and that
it explains many of Wolfe's literary choices.

If you never wondered why Silk was invited to by the Mainframe operators to
be scanned and merged with Pas....
or if it doesn't seem odd to you that Kypris, Echidna, and Scylla would back
as Calde' an obscure augur of the poorest mantaeon in a Whorl-city that has
relinquished proper worship (human sacrifice...
or if it is not striking to you that Silk has a "typhonic" beard
(reddish-blonde) as Grave's (an important Wolfe source) called it in "King
Jesus"...
or if any significance to Silk sharing in many of the same archetypal
references as Pas and Typhon fly right by you...

...well, then recognizing that Silk is a clone of Typhon would only
convolute things for you. If those bits seem peculiar or significant then
Silk-as-Typhon's-clone clears up a lot of things.

The danger as I see it is that there are a lot merging and confabulating of
identities in the Long Sun and it is too easy to try to resolve them all
with one more clone.  Wolfe has shown himself too clever to over-use a
single method let alone such an obvious one. First he has bios merging with
chems,  and then separately he has chems merging with bios. He has a boy
merging with his teacher. He has Mainframe gods merging in various ways with
humanity, and according to Silk, one of them merging identies with the real
God. He has an alien monster merging self-interest with the best attributes
of humanity to the point that he became a saintly old man sacrificing his
life to guide his people to Green so they can be food so his race can
further internalize humanity. In the NS we have people merging with an alien
monster by being devoured and people merging with people through eating them
(once again self-interest merged with altruism as the beast gave its life to
protect its food/family).  In tFHoC we have clones, yes, but we also have
alien "abos" becoming and replacing humans (has anyone pointed out that VRT
and Number 5 share dreams as though they are twins?).

I'm not sure yet why or how Auk is Silk or Severian. But I doubt it will be
only another clone. It will be some new method or a clever twist on some
method already used.

-- Crush

--=20

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