I just finished reading this along with your podcasts. Excellent job again. I haven't read ahead, I am reading this for the first time. A few thoughts.
The repeated experiments on each generation of clone isn't a abuse cycle like people in our world experience. It is beyond that and into the realm of torture as expermentation so the fathers explanation doesn't make sense unless they are trying to unlock genetic memories.
The nature/nurture left me with questions. It discounts the brother David as an influence unless all other previous clones also had a brother? Why would each clone come to the same conclusions as the previous ones? This would seem to preclude the idea of original thoughts or that our ability to chose is always predetermined by our genetics and formative years.
Mr. Millions is the true villain of this story. None of this clone business would work out without him guiding each generation. There would be no ability to have a clone be raised the same without his guidance. The original human who uploaded himself into Mr. Millions also created the first clone and was obsessed with retaining his memories for some reason? To cheat death?
I enjoyed your references to the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner. In the poem the sin caused the ship to be stuck in becalmed zone with no wind. In Fith head the whole planet is becalmed as shown be the ships with 5 or 7 masts. A ship like that on earth would be torn apart by normal winds or storms so they must not exist on St. Croix.
On my first reading I thought John V. Marsch was also killed by the narrator but the text doesn't support that.
Looking forward to the next novella and your podcast.
Right, absolutely. I remember I was thinking of that phrase in terms of late-antique Latin writers sometimes thinking of God in terms of a pilot (helmsman) or gubernator, but didn't really come up with anything coherent about it, and you've definitely cracked it.
Yeah. I'm more and more convinced of it.
While listening to the podcast episode all about dreams on my walk to work this morning, I was reminded that Mr. Million is called a steersman in that cryptic dream passage about a mysterious ethical theory.
But he continued to speak, and the few words I caught suggested that he was lecturing upon an ethical theory whose postulates seemed even to him doubtful. I felt a dread of hearing this talk and tried to keep myself as much as possible toward the bow, but the wind at times carried the words to me with great clarity, and whenever I looked up from my work I found myself much nearer the stern, sometimes in fact almost touching the dead steersman, than I had supposed.
Oh, this is awesome. I didn't make this connection at all, but it seems so obvious that Wolfe was thinking about it.
I listened to the discussion for part III as I walked home tonight and found it very stimulating.
Given the prominence of Plato's Phaedrus in the discussion, I thought it might be fun to point out the origin of the word "cybernetic." Norbert Wiener, the originator of cybernetics, was directly inspired by the Phaedrus when he coined the word:
Wiener borrowed this term not only from the Greeks in general, but from Plato in particular, who uses the term in the Phaedrus to describe the human soul in terms of a "cybernetes," a pilot or a steersman (Plato, n.d., 247C). Socrates's steersman is a charioteer who must work in conjunction with two horses that, metaphorically, power the human soul. One horse is virtuous and noble, the other base and unruly, and it is the charioteer's job to manage them and create equilibrium—a sort of Socratic differential mechanism. While the cybernetes is the captain of this vehicle, he is just as much a part of the circuit of horse and chariot as he is the one who presides over it. In other words, Wiener's word choice is strategic; by referring to Plato's charioteer, Wiener suggests that the feedback that occurs between, in his words, "man, animal, and the world about" has always been at the very essence of what it means to be human.
I might also add that the word is explicitly mentioned in the story when we learn that Mr. Million has "the name of a cybernetics company on Earth" stamped on his cabinet.
I just finished reading the first of the three novellas last night, and have started listening to the podcasts covering the story. I enjoyed it very much, and find myself wanting to reread it again already, if only to luxuriate in the prose. The podcasts have also been great fun, and I now have many more things to look out for when I do decide to plunge back into the story.
Daniel mentions the many-masted ships and their connections to Coleridge's poem with its becalmed waters. I wanted to add a thing or two to this. (Ignore my post if these things have been explored elsewhere. As I mentioned, I haven't listened to all the recorded discussions yet.)
This is one of the descriptions we get in the story:
And there, while David shot arrows at a goose stuffed with straw or played tennis, I often sat staring at the quiet, only slightly dirty water, or waiting for one of the white ships--great ships with bows as sharp as the scalpel bills of kingfishers and four, five, or even seven masts--which were, infrequently towed up from the harbor by ten or twelve spans of oxen.
I begin by simply noting in passing the scalpel imagery which strikes me as significant given that our narrator comes to carry a scalpel wherever he goes, and really puts it to use later in the story.
What I really wanted to focus on though is the kingfisher imagery. I find myself wondering about it. Are we dealing with another one of Wolfe's tightly-bound bundle of allusions?
Our Late Antique friend Isidore of Seville describes the kingfisher bird in this way:
The alcyon (i.e. "halcyon," in classical Latin, "king-fisher"), a sea bird, is named as if the word were ales oceana (ocean bird), because in winter it makes its nest and raises its young on still waters in the ocean. It is said that when they are brooding on its expansive surface, the sea grows calm with the winds silent in continuous tranquility for seven days, and nature herself cooperates in the rearing of their young.
I can't help but detect certain resonances. There's the connection to calm waters which brings to mind the waters of both Sainte Croix and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, with all of their implied stagnation. Next up is the rearing of children by the kingfisher. This brings to mind the two brothers in the story and their peculiar upbringings. There's also the idea of nature herself cooperating in the rearing which seemingly speaks to the role of nature in the making of a man-- a key theme in the story. There's even something seasonal going on in Isidore's kingfisher talk, though here things get more tenuous.
Oh, I envy you! I wish I could read this book for the first time again! I won't say much here for risk of spoiling you, but I will say that I really love your observation about David's place in the nurture of the narrator. In general, I think the statements about the determination of genetics and experiences during the first two years more-or-less determining someone's personality to be silly (they aren't wrong, up to a point), and I think Wolfe thought they were silly, too -- they ignore so many other important variables. David certainly isn't a controllable factor in this experiment, and I think rather proves that the idea is silly. That's a great observation.
And keep posting as you read!