(urth) Pirate Freedom revisited

[Andrew Bollen]

On Sun, Nov 4, 2012 at 4:44 AM, Jerry Friedman <jerry_friedman at yahoo.com>wrote:

> Very interesting.
>
> For Chris's parents to be himself and Novia is genetically drastically
> unlikely.  Even if you make Novia Chris's daughter (!), the odds are worse
> than 1 in 70 trillion that the baby would get the right set of chromosomes.
>

That's a fair criticism, of course. I wish I were more comfortable than I
am with the counter-argument that the genetic odds are surely far greater
than the probability of Chris' time-travel - so if one, why not the other?

You can avoid the problem by making one of the other sailors the biological
father, but there's just about nothing in the text to hang that on. Some
lack of absolute confidence on Chris' part concerning Novia's total
fidelity to him; the big fight they have while battling through the straits
of Magellan ... Weak.



>  I'd prefer for Chris to be a clone of himself, which would be amusing.
>  (It's been suggested that he's a clone, since he calls himself a
> "half-human monster" and never mentions his mother.)  That would leave the
> problem of when he was engineered to be tall.
>

I've never liked the cloning idea for Chris - it would have to happen in
~2007, as far as I can see, not at some future date when the technology
might actually exist - and anyway I don't think there's much in the text to
support cloning. Some kind of genetic engineering fits better - Chris
constructed in a test-tube as a monstrous hybrid between human and, say,
wolf. Sometimes St Christopher was depicted as having the head of a dog,
and at least to me, Chris has some of the characteristics of an animal
predator - whatever empathy he has for his victims is irrelevant with
respect to his actual ruthlessness, but on the other hand there is no hit
of sadism or psychopathy. This would deal with lack of mother, "egineered"
and "half-human monster" but not the technological implausibility or the
basic question of why his "father" would want to do such a thing.
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