(urth) Pirate Freedom notes

[Jerry Friedman]

> From: Gwern Branwen <gwern0 at gmail.com>
...

>First, where's this stuff about him being cloned coming from? The one
>bit of evidence I've seen is a quote to the effect that "my father
>made me"; I can't find this in my _Pirate Freedom_ EPUB (but FBReader
>seems to have buggy search so this may not count). But at face value,
>this seems completely unconvincing to me: he's a *Mafia* guy! All "my
>father made me" means is that he's a "made man", as one would expect
>of the son of a big Mafia figure. Chris even says at one point to a
>new pirate something to the effect 'now you're a made man". Presumably
>no one thinks Chris just zapped him with some tailored RNA viruses...


But Chris is not a "made man" in the Mafia sense, as I understand it.  He's
never been part of the Mafia.  But I don't remember him saying such a
thing and it's not at Google Books.

>"Half-human monster" is more promising, but in context, there's no
>mention of simply human: "The artists of the Middle Ages painted
>allegories, we say. What really happened was that they saw more
>clearly than we do, and painted what they saw—angels and devils,
>beasts, and half-human monsters like me." The artists were painting
>clones? Or is this just more Christian thought a la Pope? The best
>line is "I am taller than most people—my father told me once he got me
>engineered that way—and I was taller than he was by quite a bit." but
>height has been known to be hereditable since Galton and a fair number
>of genes have already been identified responsible for variance, so
>even simple embryo selection (make multiple embryos, sequence the
>genomes of each, implant the best-scoring one) would work for that.


If there was one with the right gene combinations for considerably greater
height.

The other clue that Chris is a clone (or has a genome created from
scratch or something) is that he never mentions his mother.  He doesn't
even say that he's especially tempted to go to New Jersey and see the
mother he never knew.

However, I don't think this is proof.

>Second, there's something really weird about the lack of attention
>paid to the timeslips.

I agree.

>Having read a bunch of theories, I can't say any of them seem
>especially plausible. No one has a good explanation of Jaime's
>self-immolation or disappearance, Valentin & dog's murder, the
>apparent foreknowledge of Lesage, Chris's father (if he is a later
>Chris, why is he much shorter than his 'son'?)

That's a good point.  I think it pretty much settles the question.

> or the monastery's
>behavior. Nothing that ties them all together. It's a little
>frustrating, since once the various points are identified it feels
>like there should be an obvious answer.


I don't know about that, though.
...

>On a sidenote, the speech about the many Church sex abuse scandals is
>disgusting. I don't take this as Wolfe deliberately giving us evidence
>of Chris being a depraved monster, it reads too sincerely and is
>consistent with the crankery I've documented elsewhere (although I
>fully expect someone to reply saying 'no, don't confuse the text with
>the author, let's interpret it as charitably as possible', just like
>they did with the *non*fiction predictions I posted); the leadup to
>his speech is itself misleading and slanted, completely ignoring the
>central enabling coverup role the Church played for decades upon end.
>There is no reason to not mention the Church's role, since the Bishop
>is not otherwise portrayed sympathetically and mentioning it would
>both be factually accurate and continue characterizing the Bishop...
>The setup is also, shall we say, curious for making the victims
>adolescents and not younger still as they so often were.

I just looked at it again, the part I can see at GB, and I read this very
differently from you and David Stockhoff.  Chris makes it clear that
there were little girls who were victims too, just not in the cases the
bishop mentions.  So we're not being told that all the cases were like
the ones in their church.  (Does this mean, though, that Chris knew
about little girls being molested and didn't report it?)

Also, we've all heard endless condemnation of the molestations and
the cover-ups.  There's no need for either Wolfe or Chris to join in
that.  What Chris does comment on is what's important to him, namely
violence (and non-violence).  He gives the reader, who already condemns
the church for the molestations and cover-ups, an /additional/ reason
to condemn it.

By the way, in our reality, did American Catholic priests teach boys to
"act like sheep"?  Did they discourage fighting even in self-defense?

> It's also a
>little strange that Wolfe expects the 'Communists to fall'. Even when
>this was being written, Cuba's government had been substantially
>liberalizing and privatizing. There's pretty much no reason to expect
>them to 'fall' as opposed to follow a gradual transition to being,
>like China, Communist in name-only.


What you describe is certainly the way to bet, but I think there could
still be a revolution there, maybe after a hard-line Communist
reaction.  It's not too implausible for fiction.  Also, as David Stockhoff
says, the book may take place in an alternate universe.  The monorails
certainly suggest that, as does genetic engineering if we assume Chris
is born or decanted not too long after the publication date.

Jerry Friedman