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

Chris Thompson · 04 Jan 2006, 22:31 · from rec.arts.sf.written.2006.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: cet1 at cus.cam.ac.uk (Chris Thompson)
Subject: Re: Blish's "Conscience" vs. Wolfe's "Fifth Head"
Date: 4 Jan 2006 22:31:23 GMT
Message-ID: <dphibr$ebf$1 at gemini.csx.cam.ac.uk>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written
References: <1135781723.546189.19520 at g49g2000cwa.googlegroups.com> <1135815134.304806.19780 at g47g2000cwa.googlegroups.com> <MPG.1e1e0926b714556398a8f6 at news1.eircom.net> <1135977318.382507.90100 at o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com>

>Gerry Quinn wrote:
[...]
>> Nor, if it is evil, does it indicate *why* it is evil.
>
>In this case, because it's egoistical, I think.

For some reason, I am reminded of Ethan's description of why the
Athosian religion considers cloning a sin. Specifically, the sin
of Vanity.

("That's a sin?", Terrence says bemusedly, IIRC.)

-- 
Chris Thompson
Email: cet1 [at] cam.ac.uk

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