godlings

Michael Straight · 20 Apr 2001, 08:52 · 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: Michael Straight <straight at email.unc.edu>
Subject: Re: (whorl) godlings
Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2001 08:52:33
Message-ID: <whorl-v0012-0664 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/whorl/archives/v0012/0664.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

On Fri, 20 Apr 2001, William Ansley wrote:

> [1] I still think this is a weak point in the books, although some=20
> have defended it. I certainly suppose that might be possible to make=20
> robots out of parts that could all serve as replacements for various=20
> human organs,=20

Do we see any chem to human transfers in Long Sun?   Or were you just
referring to Jonas?  Having a robot canibalize a human's prosthetics for
spare parts is not so hard to swallow, but I agree going the other way
seems a lot harder.

> [3] You may well say I am arguing as if I still consider the Sun=20
> books to be SF, although I said that I had abandoned that belief in=20
> an earlier message.=20

The Sun books are SF, they're SF in a universe where miracles happen. =20
But just because some miracles occur (the New Sun, FTL Astral Travel)
doesn't mean that everything should be explained as a miracle.  For
example, just because astral travel is possible, it doesn't follow that
robots can use human organs for spare parts.

I feel certain Wolfe wants his readers to be asking, "How did that
happen?  How does that work?" in an SF sort of way, but at the same time,
he gives us a story where the answer to some of those questions is that
there is no scientific explanation.

-Rostrum

*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