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

westprog · 30 Dec 2005, 16:59 · from rec.arts.sf.written.2005.mbox

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From: "westprog" <westprog at hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: Blish's "Conscience" vs. Wolfe's "Fifth Head"
Date: Fri, 30 Dec 2005 16:59:50 -0000
Message-ID: <dp3p60$f1g$1 at news.datemas.de>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written
References: <1135781723.546189.19520 at g49g2000cwa.googlegroups.com> <douf3o$bho$1 at news.datemas.de> <1135795018.842798.188130 at g49g2000cwa.googlegroups.com> <1135877831.656304.321780 at z14g2000cwz.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.

Wolfe is the SF author who is least liable to be summed up in a couple of
sentences. Indeed, his work is so dense that an anyway complete summary
would probably be twice as long as the original story.

J/

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