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

Mark · 29 Dec 2005, 17:37 · 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: "Mark" <mtiedemann at earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: Blish's "Conscience" vs. Wolfe's "Fifth Head"
Date: 29 Dec 2005 09:37:11 -0800
Message-ID: <1135877831.656304.321780 at z14g2000cwz.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>

>> An ignorant opinion?<<
>Cloning and the genetic improvement of humankind is purely evil and
doomed to failure.<

The story is about epistatic drift, only in this case is moral drift
rather than genetic.  Also, a bit of transactional analysis thrown
in--people follow "scripts" sometimes with incredible fidelity, often
to their own detriment.  He mixed a bit of Rousseau's "Emile" in as
well...it's by no means a simplistic concoction Wolfe came up with and
it doesn't reduce at all to a one-line condemnation.

Mark
author of:
THE SECANTIS SEQUENCE
REMAINS
www.marktiedemann.com

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