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

Wayne Throop · 29 Dec 2005, 06:23 · 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: throopw at sheol.org (Wayne Throop)
Subject: Re: Blish's "Conscience" vs. Wolfe's "Fifth Head"
Date: Thu, 29 Dec 2005 06:23:01 GMT
Message-ID: <1135837381 at sheol.org>
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> <43b2ecc8$0$314$8046368a at newsreader.iphouse.net> <1135802577.600104.325410 at g49g2000cwa.googlegroups.com> <43b2ffd3$0$815$8046368a at newsreader.iphouse.net> <1135810650.498075.97470 at g43g2000cwa.googlegroups.com> <ibc6r11ip31sma9ls3qastdkte0u88u3hb at 4ax.com> <1135817297 at sheol.org> <sbu6r1hp47tq1bfl9tavfr04asll5r9h9m at news.rcn.com>

:::: Because clones are evil, you see.  They just are. 

::: Especially natural ones. 

:: Xref "Split Heirs". 

: Lawrence Watt-Evans <lwe at sff.net>
: Well, we don't know for sure whether anyone there's actually clones --
: certainly Arbol isn't. 

True; I was unclear.  I mean, that if there were natural clones
in that setting, they would be considered "evil" in some sense.
Or at least a Bad Thing To Have Happened.  Didn't mean to imply 
the siblings were genetically identical.

No other setting came to mind in which twins/triplets/etc
are considered a Bad Thing.  Well... there was a Dilvish where
if twin's are sorcerers, they are each only half-strength, leading
to some... er... sibling rivalry.

: The real rule that applies _there_ (and which we were going to base
: the sequel on) is that all uncles of young rulers are evil. 

Also a good rule of thumb.

Wayne Throop   throopw at sheol.org   http://sheol.org/throopw

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