(urth) S&S vs. SF in BotNS

[Jerry Friedman]

From: David Stockhoff dstockhoff at verizon.net
>On 12/20/2011 11:03 PM, Jeff Wilson wrote:
>> On 12/20/2011 7:23 PM, Jerry Friedman wrote:

[the analeptic alzabo]
 
>>> 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.

To me, the problem of rejection seems quite different, as we know ways to deal with that.  Most simply, the boy who "donated" blood may have been O-, and the leech may have known that.
 
And whether the beliefs of the '70s licensed the alzabo or not, I don't see that the beliefs of the '90s licensed the still less plausible inhumi. 

>Ultan's remarks are key, although I think they do not refer only to the analeptic alzabo but to larger concepts of interest to Severian and Wolfe. At any rate, the principle of what you might call "spiritual cannibalism" already exists---that is, the pre-scientific concept that when you eat the seat of your dead enemy's soul, you eat his soul. Any further details will be particular to the genre, setting, or audience---in our case, "plausible" science.
>
>In addition, if the brain is so potent, there was plenty of Thecla's to go around the table in thimblefuls. That would seem to make eating the body redundant, but it's easy to construct a social/ritual/magical explanation for this that would be acceptable to the Vodalarii, or to imagine that the feast was so much more, as a sensual or even as a bonding experience,  than a simple injection of cells/RNA to acquire memories. The presentation of the body alone suggests a cultural significance on the level of a spectacular wedding feast.
 
But then why do we have to imagine it, and why the red herring of Severian's and Ultan's interchange about the corpse's hands, as Jeff mentioned above?  If Wolfe had wanted us to think of this as science fiction, he could easily have restricted the whole thing to brains, which would indeed have been licensed by the RNA and planaria beliefs of the time and by the reference to holography, another sf cliche back then (though not tremendously compatible with the RNA theory).  He seems to undercut this deliberately by implying that the memory is in the whole body, when we know perfectly well that injuries that don't interfere with brain function don't affect the memory.
 
Jerry Friedman