(urth) S&S vs. SF in BotNS

[Jeff Wilson]

On 12/21/2011 2:19 PM, Jerry Friedman wrote:
> 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.

It may have, but there's never any mention of bad blood mixing, Sev 
speaks as if he's observed several people with artificial limbs before, 
and Jonah's crew apparently had access to technology that allowed 
arbitrary combinations of flesh and machine to restore his frame. Jonah 
has apparently been half-man, half-machine for decades, where is he 
getting the anti-rejection drugs that no one sees him taking? What about 
Typhon and Piaton?

> 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.

They don't need to, the Inhumi's borrowed sapience can proceed by 
extrapolation from the alzabo's. Not that the continuity between the 
series is particularly tight.


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