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↰ answers Michael Andre-Driussi
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----- Original Message -----
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From: "Michael Andre-Driussi" <mantis at siriusfiction.com>
Or is this, in fact, your larger point? That my sticking point of the story, my sense that it makes no sense for Clio to kamikaze when she is worth more alive and in place--are you telling me that Clio is a leader and yes, she is ready, willing, and finally able to kill even one corporate stooge with a suicide bomb?
Basically, yes.
But it is not the fact that she kills someone. The real fight is a moral one, like all real fights. It is the fight to build and maintain a winning coalition.
I am speculating here, but I believe that the rebel kamikazis are not "pawns" but more like "saints" - epitomes of ideals that the best of revolutionaries follow as best they can. If they were not utterly honest, and if their leaders were not utterly honest, the revolutionaries would fall apart.
Part of the thick bundle of messages Clio's act carries is a message to her own followers that they are saints, not pawns. Clio cannot be cowed, co-opted, communicated with, or copulated with to any end: and she is a
leader of the revolutionaries.
Of course Wolfe is not pro-revolutonary. The new revolutionary morality is not only post-American but post-Christian and post-Catholic. But that is not the point. The point is that it is a new, living, thing, - living though alien and evil to Wolfe - displacing the old dying world.
hartshorn
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That this, finally, is the point of transcendent evolution I have not yet understood?
I think you have got it :-)