(urth) House of Ancestors
Dave Tallman
davetallman at msn.com
Mon May 26 01:38:40 PDT 2008
Greg Bates wrote:
> 1) Is the "Joe" in the last paragraph of the story actually Joe, or a robot
> created by the Thing? I get this impression from the last sentence of the
> story in which Joe remembers that his girlfriend is pregnant. Earlier on,
> we're told that anyone who enters the Thing gets "a segment" of their
> genetic code read and an extrapolated ancestor as their guide created from
> the DNA sample. So at first, I figured "Joe" is a creation of his unborn
> child's DNA created by the Thing, except that your clone mimics you at the
> time of your conception, ergo Joe wouldn't be talking about getting the nail
> removed from his heart.
I think the Joe at the end is a real person. At the point they find him
sitting outside, Bonnie had not yet entered the Thing. Her unborn child
was not involved, except to give him assurance of continuation. Even if
he dies in the operation he will live on through his child.
> So now i'm confused again. What's the significance
> of having a protagonist with a nail in his chest anyway? It's clear Wolfe
> never adds a detail for no reason.
>
Joe wouldn't get an operation because he had a subconscious death-wish.
He faced and defeated that part of himself. Symbolically, the nail in
the heart reminds me of images the Sacred Heart of Mary. His female
ancestors partake of his suffering and are a crucial factor in helping him.
> 2) What's the significance of the paragraph in italics at the beginning? It
> describes two people looking through the fair's telescope (presumably at the
> top globe of the Thing where the climax of the story takes place), one right
> before and one right after the climax. However, isn't the fair supposed to
> be deserted, none of the exhibits open? Are the woman and the man characters
> from the party Joe is with? What the hell does it mean?
>
These people are looking up at the building from a long way off. I
picture them as tourists looking through the pay telescopes at the top
of the Empire State Building.
"For a few seconds a figure stood at one of those holes; then another
who struggled with him; then both were gone."
Without this line, one might think that everything that happened after
Joe went into the Thing took place only in his mind. In fact, what seems
to have happened is a form of timeless information feedback, almost time
travel.
"He could sense her beside him in the blackness; and unexpectedly,
overwhelmingly, the certainty came to him that they had waited together
like this before, and that the sensation he now felt was familiar
through countless repetitions."
Somehow, what his ancestor robots learn is fed back to him across time.
Joe contains his ancestors, and these robot copies somehow link to their
souls. What Joe's "mother" knows was transmitted to him at conception,
therefore he knows it too. When he gives up his death-wish, that too is
transmitted back. He now chooses to wait at the entrance instead of
going in. The others would have said something if they found him
bloodied. All that happened in the Thing has been undone except for the
internal change that leads him to ask for the operation. (I'm reminded
of "Free Live Free" -- have you read this?)
I'm still trying to suspend disbelief about the scale of the Thing. My
back-of-the-envelope calculations say it would be taller than the orbit
of the moon. There are over 200 million base pairs in a typical DNA
molecule which is part of the human genome. Every atom is represented.
Wolfe is an engineer, so I'll assume he crunched the numbers better than
I did for the height. But how much time would it take to prepare
presentations for all those rooms? How could a world's fair visitor have
the time to see them all?
More information about the Urth
mailing list