Codename: Alex
Alex David Groce · 01 Oct 1999, 19:46
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From: Alex David Groce <Alex_Groce at gs246.sp.cs.cmu.edu> Subject: Re: (whorl) Codename: Alex Date: Fri, 01 Oct 1999 19:46:20 Message-ID: <whorl-v0010-0047 at digest.urth.net> X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/whorl/archives/v0010/0047.shtml MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable But if this is Krait's big nasty secret, how does it reduce the inhumi to (inexact quote, I'm at work) "little more than animals." If the secret strategic victory over the inhumi is to bury them all alive, I think both Horn and the inhumi are vastly over-reacting to the threat! The inhumi pulled out of the ground are back to their normal nasty selves after a quick fix of cow, and certainly don't seem reduced to animal level. Mind you, I don't think my "intelligent blood" thing is the exact secret either--it has to be something people could DO to the inhumi (don't let them drink blood? that's already the goal... force feed them stupid animals? also unlikely). I think the burial is MORE inhumane now, if the inhumi (as seems) are someh= ow conscious for a long period/forever. Horn's approach to this is interestin= g, in that it's Silk-like, since he doesn't let them stay that way which would be monstrous, but (very vaguely) Machiavellian in that he USES his solution to this moral problem to win his war. =20 The intelligent blood idea does present the cruel vision of species that, in order to remain morally and intellectually aware, must do something morally repulsive. Essentially, to have any will, they must exercise their will in a malevolent way. "And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." John 8:32 -- Alex David Groce (agroce+ at cs.cmu.edu) Ph.D. Student, Carnegie Mellon University - Computer Science Department 8112 Wean Hall (412)-268-3066 http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~agroce *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
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