(urth) started my second read of New Sun

[Gwern Branwen]

On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 3:01 PM, Lane Haygood <lhaygood at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 1:41 PM, Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <danldo at gmail.com> wrote:
>> While de Chardin has not been officially denounced as a heretic, severe
>> "warnings" are attached to his work by the Roman Catholic Church.
>>
>
> Which has not, of course, kept Roman Catholic authors from utilizing
> his philosophy and theology as the basis for their stories.
>
> I think Wolfe, unlike Simmons, might stop short of saying that man
> will surpass God as the Hieros surpassed Man.  The idea of man
> creating his superior is not foreign to sf; robotics (and more
> recently) genetic manipulation have produced many such stories.  The
> trope of the created surpassing the creator, the student defeating the
> master, etc., is a very common one.
>
> But Wolfe (who loves to f$%! with tropes) might be stopping this one
> up a bit short.  Maybe the evolution isn't so much circular as it is
> spiral-shaped... ever increasing but always falling short of the true
> majesty of the Increate because no matter how great the successive
> lower-universe iterations get, all the way from protozoa to
> Hierogrammates to angels or whatever, they are all still bounded by
> temporality and being subject to this notion of change from one thing
> to the other, of growth.

Spiral-shaped? Come on, this isn't R.A. Laffferty or _Tengen Toppen
Gurren Lagann_. :)

-- 
gwern