Urth Net

← back to the conversation

Codename: Alex

Alex David Groce · 01 Oct 1999, 19:46 · from whorl-v0010.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: 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




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