(urth) interview questions

[Dave Muir-Bacon]

I'm enjoying the on-going discussion of Cerberus (sorry, 5HoC) having
recently reread it, but could somebody please post a link to the
original "interview" that prompted these questions?

I realise I could probably find it by looking back through the archives
but that might be a slow process.


Thanks
Dave M-B

-----Original Message-----
From: urth-bounces at lists.urth.net [mailto:urth-bounces at lists.urth.net]
On Behalf Of Lee Berman
Sent: 06 January 2011 14:10
To: urth at lists.urth.net
Subject: (urth) interview questions



The elephant in the room for me still remains: Veil's Hypothesis. Gerry
has used some rather colorful adjectives to describe his opinion of its
veracity and those who might consider its veracity. I'm wondering,
Gerry, has the ongoing discussion opened things up any for you?  
 
Borski devoted a chapter of Long and Short of It to this issue, with the
premise that Veil's Hypothesis must be considered as a possible
conclusion. Some of his evidence involves the appearance of lingering
shapeshifting in characters we would expect to rule out from being abos.
I haven't seen Borski state it explicitly but I suspect he tends to
agree with my assessment of anti-Occam as a guiding principle when it
comes to understanding Wolfe.
 
Somewhere in the text of 5HoC is the explication of a certain
engineering priniciple or process; something about finding the heat
distribution in irregular objects by a series of closer and closer
approximations, iirc.
 
For me this is second only to Veil's Hypothesis as a key to explaining
what is really going on in these two planets. I think it is a mistake to
get stuck on a single example of replacement, green eyes, tool use
issues etc. and assume that's all there is.
 
Surely the human body, brain and psyche are irregular objects. I detect
a subtext which implies that the imitation process is not a single
event, but ongoing, with progressively closer approximations of perfect
imitation. This subtext is subtle and vague.  By contrast, Veil's
Hypothesis is so jarring a hammerblow that it leaves us stunned and
mostly unable to detect the other fine-grained hints without multiple
readings. (GRW you devious bastard!)
 
That is one of the purposes of "A Story". In Shadow Children we are
shown a very poor approximation of humanity. They can't be shown in the
main text of the story because they would ruin the earthian,
frenchy-colonial ambience Wolfe has established for St. Croix. But we
NEED to see them to see the earlier stages of imitation/approximation
which have been almost perfected in the main text characters we see.
 
This idea resonates with a certain recurring principle in Wolfe's work.
Lamarckian evolution. Wolfe may even have mentioned this term in an
interview but I'm not sure. Back when 5HoC was written, the Central
Dogma of Biology was the overwhelmingly domininant perspective. I can
guess Wolfe is pleased with research in the past 25 years suggesing the
occasional reversal of  Central Dogma and the environment feeding back
to the organism and enacting permanent genetic changes within it, during

the lifetime of the organism. 		 	   		  
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