Pas[sing] as Urthling

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes · 12 Mar 2001, 16:06 · from whorl-v0012.mbox · original

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: "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes" <ddanehy at siebel.com>
Subject: RE: (whorl) Pas[sing] as Urthling
Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2001 16:06:58
Message-ID: <whorl-v0012-0437 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/whorl/archives/v0012/0437.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

> For all we know Typhon's body--the part we never see (although I
> hear the autopsy photos may soon appear on FOX)--could have any
> number of limbs, or even one hundred heads, like the Typhon of
> Classical Mythology.

Some of us, as it happens, _have_ reread SWORD recently. My copy
isn't here at work with me, but... Do you recall _why_ he did a
head transplant instead of just putting his brain into Piaton's
body?  "The face." One. People were accustomed to obeying this one
face. Reasonable conclusion: Typhon-pre-surgery had one face and
thus, most likely, one head.=20

Supporting evidence: A race with two or more heads (in, at least,
the usual meaning of this phrase) and only one personality would=20
_not_ have the personality "stored" in a single head. Either it
would be distributed among heads, or it would be somewhere else
(cf. Pierson's Puppeteers). But Typhon is a single, apparently
normal human, head, grafted onto Piaton's body.

> Factoring in the "I was not born as I am, or born at all"
> leaves even more wriggle room, no?

Yes, but not for the "Typhon is a Neighbor" theory. (When=20
a theory starts needing wiggle room, it's probably time to=20
abandon it.) Much more plausible (particularly given the=20
level of biotech that produced Silk and Mucor) is the idea=20
that he was a gengineered in-vitro "birth."=20

Actually, I picture him as looking like Ricardo Montalban...

--Blattid

*This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun.
*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.moonmilk.com/whorl/
*To leave the list, send "unsubscribe" to whorl-request at lists.best.com
*If it's Wolfe but not Long Sun, please use the URTH list: urth at lists.best.=
com

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