I was baiting everyone with the question of magic in TBOTNS.  Magic doesn't really exist for Wolfe or Tolkien in the sense that it is "unnatural" or "supernatural".  The idea of the supernatural is actually a Protestant view which almost corresponds to the scientific revolution.  One of the things I think Wolfe is saying about the bios and the chems is that there is no fundamental difference between the natural and the artificial. Mechanical life is life, even if it is not "ensouled".  If you notice American commericials always talk about natural and artificial ingredients, and Reagen passed the "designer" drug legislation when he created the ATF.  Just because something is created by human design doesn't mean it is unnatural.  In academia, we've cut up not only the sciences and the humanities but philosophy and literature from psychology and history.  It's true there is specialization and one person like Da Vinci can't write the encyclopedia galatica now, but that doesn't mean we should stop communication between systems of knowledge.  In this very general sense of I don't know if it makes sense to talk about genre in the sense of science fiction, fantasy, horror and "literature" etc.  However, I would categorize most books with scifi/fantasy content, romances.   Novels in literary theory at least the definition of the novel is very limited. Besides, Wolfe, H.G. Wells also called his books science romances.  Also, in Italy they still call books romanze rather than novelli, this is important, I think, because the novel is both a Protestant and Enlightenment construction.  I don't know, then, if any Catholic scifi book can be a novel.  

Stanislaus launched a preemptive strike with wave functions before me, and did it with Tolkien.  One thing I will say about Gandalf's power is that he is an incarnate being rather than one with an assumed body like Tom Bombadil, which has its advantages and disadvantages and is not an issue in order of complexity. Reality in middle-earth in the third age as opposed to Aman is more inflexible.  Part of the winding down of the universe is the rigidity and low probability of drastic change.  

However, the advantage of being human in Ea over anything else is that the permutations of life available to you are more numerous than any other kind of person, especially the Valar. For Tolkien I think power is a kind of black box technology which operates on a level of base secondary reality, which is what he calls creation.  This corresponds to Bohr's ideas about assignment in quantum mechanics, so I think it is a good metaphor, but I think the concept of probability is a little bit misleading in that Tolkien's implication is the process is more casually efficacious and direct than quantum mechanics and of course happens at a macroscopic level.  It is, I think, conceptually more extreme than Wolfe's idea of the power of the heirodoles, even if there are less manipulations of form that is percieved by humans.  Tolkien has a kind of modesty about him.  At the same time Namo  Mandos is not so much an oracle as a statistician or to use Asimov's idea of pscyhohistory.  He is practically blind when it comes to humans.  This is why humans are able to maintain incarnation in a rigid world whereas elves cannot.  That is a secret post-facto impetus for leaving middle-earth, the prison of disembodiment, which for the elves, is not the desirable or default mode of being.

I don't think Wolfe solve the soul, mind problem, his rejection of Descartes but not A.I. was refreshing and that's why I wanted to talk about it. Even material monists like Seale or Penrose don't think A.I. is possible, and I think that's silly.  Medieval europe had not concept of the liberal human subject, and I don't know if the humanities' view of the liberal subject is very helpful.  Notice the Catholics accepted evolution and thermodynamics while the Protestants do not, besides the fact Catholics don't deracinate Christianity.  I think this has a lot to do with the Catholic culture's ideas about animals and the natural world which extends to ideas about nonhuman persons.  The idea of the nonhuman person is an old one which the Enlightement eliminated with the liberal subject and which seems to be remanifesting in the last hundred years.  I think that's all we can really came away from the Catholic scifi A.I. debate with.  I don't think Protestanism is a problem, I just think it has facilitated the growth of spooky cultural problems, especially in America, and I think our atavism towards "artifical" life is a good example of a good cross section of the neurosis of the last three hundred years

EOT;