(urth) S&S vs. SF in BotNS

[Jeff Wilson]

On 12/20/2011 7:23 PM, Jerry Friedman wrote:
>> From: Lee Berman<severiansola at hotmail.com>
>>> Jerry Friedman: How about the analept of the alzabo and the effect of
>> drinking
>>> blook on the inhumi?  After a moment's thought, the only way I can
>> understand
>>> these is as magic, specifically the principle of contagion (if I have it
>> right).
>>
>> I think the alzabo stuff is explainable by time period. There was a very real
>> and serious camp in the 1970's which thought memory might be carried by RNA.
>> Wolfe
>> wouldn't be the only SF writer of that era to base fiction on it.
>
> Yes, but RNA in cooked flesh?  Surely it would have to be in the brain, but nothing in that scene (CotC, Ch. XI) seems to suggest that they ate Thecla's brain.  On the other hand, nothing seems to rule it out, either.
> ...

The leech and the old autarch mention that brains work best, but the 
extremely well informed Ultan says that hands are sufficient. I think 
that the memory RNA hypothesis of the time was license to go there, but 
the exact mechanism is not important, similar to the way a solution to 
transplant and implant rejection exists by implication in the accounts 
of the leech and Jonas and Severian's comments on them. The memory 
transfer is acknowledged subtextually by the author to be more involved 
in that it requires a special animal, while the rejection cure is 
apparently so well understood or had been at one time that it is still 
readily available wherever surgeons are to be found.

Or possibly, Urthers have undergone a change or a culling so that they 
don't reject implants or one another's tissue.


-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at clueland.com
Computational Intelligence Laboratory - Texas A&M Texarkana
< http://www.tamut.edu/CIL >