Date: Sat, 06 Sep 2003 17:31:41 -0500
From: James Jordan 
Subject: Re: (urth) Clones of the Long Sun

At 02:07 PM 9/6/2003, Crush wrote:
>As I see it, the chief benefit of the Typhon Clone explanation originally
>put forward by Don is the number of narrative puzzles it answers, and that
>it explains many of Wolfe's literary choices.
>
>If you never wondered why Silk was invited to by the Mainframe operators to
>be scanned and merged with Pas....

         I'm not anticlone, but my own guess when I read the books, which 
I'll offer for rebuttal, is that Silk is a son of Typhon. In Mainframe, 
Goodpas, Silk, and Kypris form a model of the Trinity, with Kypris as Love 
(and Love is the Holy Spirit in Augustinian theology). And it appears to me 
that Silk as a son of Pas would just as well account for the other things 
you listed, though perhaps not for everything that Don or someone else 
might point out:

>or if it doesn't seem odd to you that Kypris, Echidna, and Scylla would back
>as Calde' an obscure augur of the poorest mantaeon in a Whorl-city that has
>relinquished proper worship (human sacrifice...

sure, Silk is the son. Biblically, the Father intends to make the Son into 
the king, not to be king Himself; and:

>or if it is not striking to you that Silk has a "typhonic" beard
>(reddish-blonde) as Grave's (an important Wolfe source) called it in "King
>Jesus"...

sure, Silk is Jesus, and hence son, and:

>or if any significance to Silk sharing in many of the same archetypal
>references as Pas and Typhon fly right by you...

would a father-son relationship account for these? If Wolfe had in mind 
that the Trinity is One as well as Three, the identity of archetypes could 
be accounted for that way, perhaps.

>The danger as I see it is that there are a lot merging and confabulating of
>identities in the Long Sun and it is too easy to try to resolve them all
>with one more clone.

Yes. That's been my reservation also.

>  Wolfe has shown himself too clever to over-use a
>single method let alone such an obvious one. First he has bios merging with
>chems,  and then separately he has chems merging with bios. He has a boy
>merging with his teacher. He has Mainframe gods merging in various ways 
>with humanity, and according to Silk, one of them merging identies with 
>the real God.

Don't recall this, unless you're thinking of the Outsider as linked to 
someone in Mainframe. Who? I thought the whole point was that the Outsider 
is ... outside.

>  He has an alien monster merging self-interest with the best attributes
>of humanity to the point that he became a saintly old man sacrificing his
>life to guide his people to Green so they can be food so his race can
>further internalize humanity.

Very interesting spin on Q. I like it.

>In the NS we have people merging with an alien
>monster by being devoured and people merging with people through eating 
>them (once again self-interest merged with altruism as the beast gave its 
>life to protect its food/family).

All of which is not to mention simple thematic parallels that may not 
indicate any kind of physical/psychical merging; and the possibility that 
the Outsider's Spirit is creating bonds and "mergings."

FWIW

Nutria



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