I kid, I kid. Still I utterly loved that story, and I loved that you read it online. It's really quite an amazing set of connections (RUR sounds like it fits terrifyingly well too). A superb bit of literary sleuthing & sharing, there.
The thing that most surprised me in the episode was your surprise at the colonial violence. Glenn correctly points out a few of the historical precedents, but you both seemed surprised to find it portrayed in the future, in space, explaining it as due to the cold war. I guess I find it all=but inevitable, should people ever actually colonize other planets. (Incidentally, you mentioned Vietnam as a parallel to the first French & then English colonialism; it's worth bearing in mind that the Vietnam war was still going on as this novel was written — it came out in 1972 & the last American troops came home in 1973. It would have been a very live example for Wolfe at that time.)
You correctly point out that the theme of bodies, of the physicality of minds, is a theme of all these stories, and raise Mr. Milton as an example. But in a different way the clones are examples, too. Marsch speaks as if Number 5 and his father are the same person. That is both a recognition of the role of the body in the mind (what they have in common is the physicality of their DNA & the body it produces), but also a denial of it (they are, after all, in separate bodies). So it ties in with the "copying" too. To ask how physical a mind is is to ask whether minds can be copied. (Also relevant to the abos, of course.)
Why is the story written as it is? You mention some good reasons, although I would stress the "it's damn fun" even more than you did. But here are two other reasons. First, it allows for partial documents: the army officer is constantly picking up & putting down things at random, reading a bit, starting in the middle, etc, in a way that would be artificial and strained if it were just the documents given. Second, it draws (even more) attention to the fact that all we have so far are documents: one a memoir by Number 5, one "A Story" by John V. Marsch. In fact, the only "objective" (if they are that) facts in the entire book are the bits about the army officer!
In cataloging the 'objective' evidence for the Shadow Children — apart from "A Story" and the rumors — and list as one piece the stone tools in a museum on St. Croix. It only at that moment occurred to me what an odd piece of evidence that is. After all, as you yourselves noted in this episode, the inability of the Abos to use tools is referenced regularly, and is one of their defining characteristics. Whence the stone tools, then? They presumably were either made by Shadow Children, or other humans. It's a puzzle. And I wonder what light it casts on Veil's Hypothesis?
You mentioned that wonderful throwaway that "those paleolithic, Caucasoid Pygmies who came to be called the Good People (and who survived, as was eventually shown, in Scandanavia and Eire until the last years of the eighteenth century)". But it made me wonder if those weren't perhaps the origin of the Shadow Children. After all, since it looks like it was the French arriving at the end of "A Story", maybe there was a third wave? Maybe the Good People vanished in the 18th century because they somehow found a way to travel in space? (It would fit the "here for a long time" reading, of course.)
A few quick notes:
• You mentioned the sentence it appears in, but didn't mention one of my favorite Wolfe phrases ever: "Gutenberg courage". God that's perfect!
• Have you yet thought about Le Guin's story "Nine Lives" as a possible influence on Fifth Head — or, perhaps, a story he's reacting against? Mostly the first novella, as Le Guin's story is about clones. It came out in 1968, and was nominated for a Nebula award, so presumably Wolfe would have known it. Just a stray thought.
• I found it ironic that Glenn got the Ides of March wrong on air (even while recognizing that such slips are easy to make & inevitable in podcasts), not because he's a historian and probably knows it better than I, but because it's precisely the one everyone gets right usually, due to Shakespeare. Usually people erroneously think that, because of Julius Caesar, the Ideas is always the 15th, not realizing that 8 months of the year it's the 13th. But I've never heard the opposite before!
• Glenn: "I want someone to make me a play tower." Someone did! His name is Gene Wolfe. He made you a lot of them, actually.
PS: What are the five dating systems in the period you work in? I'm suddenly quite curious.
It would be a wonderfully Wolfean touch to write a story — maybe one with multiple documents à la VRT — using five concurrent dating systems, and forcing the readers to untangle them. But I suppose this is simply saying that Wolfean ambiguity mimics how life often is, especially in your job. (As an American historian, we mostly evade that one complication, at least!)
I guess I would say about colonialism that I find it much easier to imagine us doing it if you allow a little hypocritical naming on top of it. You seem to agree that America's role in Vietnam was a colonial one (flowing directly from French colonialism in that case), but I think that a lot of post-cold war American actions can be best understood as varieties of colonialism. Sure, we call it liberation or self-defense or whatever — then again, so did most of the modern colonials. (You would know better than I, but my sense is that this requirement for pretense was less intense in, say, Roman times than in the classical age of European colonialism.) Now, we're not killing people to take their land, but at least plausibly to take their oil. And I bet we'll see wars for water this century (alas). Perhaps the problem is that we don't get a depiction of events on Earth during 5th Head: I think something would need to change for precisely this sort of colonialism to take place (more authoritarian militancy, more desperation viz-a-viz land and food, or something), but I don't think we learn anything about Earth that sounds inconsistent with such developments. I can't imagine myself or my neighbors killing someone to take their farm; but my great-grandchildren? It depends on how badly things go. I guess cautionary tales is the right category, but I find it far more of a live threat (if not an immediate one). Even Francis Fukiyama is now admitting that the end of history was a bad call!
I look forward to the patreon episode on "Nine Lives". And Le Guin is wonderful, so you have some real treats in store for you!
Ha, yes, I always forget there are months when the Ides are the 15th. Of course, the whole scheme of Roman dating is crazy and awful to begin with. Half the work my field does is just about trying to get dates right because there are five concurrent systems of dating years and it's not always clear which one a given chronicler is using. One cheer to modernity!
We've definitely both read this story through a post-Cold War lens, having been told that history has ended. I'm a soldier and also a military historian so it's not as if I have any illusions about humanity's propensity for violence, but I still find the notion that an Earth society that looks so much like ours would have colonial space violence of this sort. I mean, do you really think that we would go to war with France over controlling Mars? Or, to think about it more akin to what is depicted here, can you imagine yourself or your neighbors or even your potential great-grandchildren volunteering to kill people and take over their farms? I have a hard time envisioning such a quick and sharp turn towards violence as a means of property acquisition. I'll say, too, of course, that I have many of the same qualms about the return of slavery, but this is something that Wolfe also writes about quite frequently, and I take them to be cautionary tales. Because of course we could return to these things if we let our guard down (and I think we have already).
We'll be releasing our first Le Guin story as a bonus episode in a few months, and I'll be the first to admit that I have now only read four works by her. But look for "Nine Lives" as a Patreon episode in 2020.
PS: I found it helpful to read (as well as hear you read) Čapek's story. In case anyone else might find it helpful too, here's the version I googled up: