Blish's "Conscience" vs. Wolfe's "Fifth Head"

galt_57 at hotmail.com · 29 Dec 2005, 00:12 · from rec.arts.sf.written.2005.mbox

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: "galt_57 at hotmail.com" <galt_57 at hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: Blish's "Conscience" vs. Wolfe's "Fifth Head"
Date: 28 Dec 2005 16:12:14 -0800
Message-ID: <1135815134.304806.19780 at g47g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written
References: <1135781723.546189.19520 at g49g2000cwa.googlegroups.com> <douf3o$bho$1 at news.datemas.de> <1135795018.842798.188130 at g49g2000cwa.googlegroups.com> <1135804521.649021.27000 at o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com>

james.t.williams at gmail.com wrote:
> I have read "Fifth Head" several times, and I never saw it as
> condemning cloning itself.
>
> In the case of the story, an aberrant personality attempts to improve
> himself through successive generations of clones. But improvement means
> change, and I don't think he really wants to change himself. So he ends
> up repeating the same mistakes, and never getting better.
>
> Don't get me wrong- I am all for physical immortality. But I also don't
> see the point of being physically immortal if you end up being
> essentially the same person for all time.

Well, I see it as basically a statement that mankind can't be improved.
You see we were made the way we are by our "creator" and this is the
only way we can be (ie Biblical viewpoint). Any attempt at improvement
is "evil" and goes against the will of our "creator." Clones are
unnatural and evil. Blah, blah, blah. But this is all so stupid and
lame that I'll hide these ignorant sentiments as the unstated
underlying basis of a story.

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