I feel like I have been negligent in posting my thoughts on "The Death of Dr. Island" — largely because I don't feel like I had that much to say beyond the fact that I really enjoyed rereading the story, and listening to your discussion of it. But never having let "nothing to say" stop me before——
The idea that you floated that most struck me was the idea that Dr. Island was an anti-Eden: an Eden with a snake but no fruit (as we see in the story). Ignacio is an anti-Christ, as you pointed out; but is he also an anti-Adam, who instead of mating with Eve and creating the human race, murdered her, and will (perhaps, at a stretch, although it seems in character) somehow end it? And does Dr. Island's nature as an anti-Eden mean (and did you say and I simply forgot that you did) that the sin in the story is not the sin of disobedience, but the sin of obedience: to Dr. Island, in some sense, but more broadly, to society — a society which (if we take Dr. Island as its representative, as it claims to be) is evil and utilitarian and interested only in functioning, not souls?
You often talk about Nicholas as being changed, transformed, etc, and discussing whether the change was good or bad (and for whom). But I took somewhat more literally the claim in the story that Nicholas and Kenneth were different people. Thus Nicholas was not (as you phrased it) changed into Kenneth, but killed to let the latter live. This, too, was a death of Dr. Island: the death of one (Nicholas) to help another (Kenneth). (It's not quite true to say you missed this — you also spoke this way — but you went back and forth; I would have hewed more strictly to the two-different-people line. It's not like having two people in one head is an unusual feature in a Wolfe story!)
The aspect of the story that I was most interested in that you didn't dwell on are the parallels/inversions with "The Island of Dr. Death and Other Stories". You quoted the bit of that interview which is also quoted on WolfeWiki and by Aramini — "I had had a very nice sort of little boy; I would have a very nasty sort: thus Tackie/Nicholas. I had had a doctor who looked like a villain; I would have one who was one but looked real good: thus Dr. Death/Dr. Island. I had a real, somewhat gritty island on the Atlantic coast; I would have an artificial island on an artificial world; thus Settler's Island/Dr. Island. And so on and so forth." — but I have never seen much more on the "so on and so forth". Marc Aramini, IIRC, mentions that whereas the first story deals in quotes from imaginary pulp stories, this novella contains many quotes from real, high-literature poems. The one other that occurs to me is that the first story is about characters escaping from a fiction into the real world; perhaps "The Death of Dr. Island" can be seen as characters from the real world (not ours, but a fictional one) put into something that is, basically, a sort of fiction: a fantastic, unreal space in which they are as out of place as Dr. Death and the others are in the world of "The Island of Dr. Death and Other Stories". But I suspect there are more; and I think it would help our interpretation if we could think about them.
A few smaller points:
• Glenn did a marvelous retelling of Prometheus, drawing out the parallels between him and Christ; but in his version, at least, I also heard the story of Adam: like Adam, Prometheus disobeys the ruler of heaven, and gets knowledge that he/humanity was not meant to have; and is punished by pain and death. (Not sure where to go with it, but I had never thought of it before, so I thought I'd point it out.)
• Glenn quoted the line in the story about how "those who prayed were usually more interesting companions than those who did not", and said, laughingly, that he thought it was Wolfe's view. I agree; but I don't think that fact reflects well on GW. It is the precise parallel to the all-too-common atheist boast that atheists are smarter than believers. Wolfe's version is a generalization that believers are tempted to (believers are deeper, more interesting) just as atheists are tempted towards their own arrogation (atheists are smarter); but both are bad temptations that ought to be avoided. Both are false (equally so), but more, both are poorly-observed, shallow, self-congratulatory, and self-refuting. Wolfe perhaps believed it; but so much the worse for Wolfe — and for his readers.
• You mention the therapy robot, and its being a symbol for robots taking human roles, and alienation, and so forth. I wonder if it is also a reference to that famous experiment, showing that when therapy patients (who lay down, and couldn't see their therapist) spoke to a tape recorder, they did about as well as those in the control group who spoke to actual therapists did?
Great story; and great discussion. I look forward to listening to "Forlesen" once they're all out!
Yes, I think one of Wolfe's chief characteristics is contrarianism, so he's critical of everything at some point.
I know you're going through this collection rather than listening to our episodes in order, and I have to say that I think that's a good choice because we followed up this dour story with one that is even more pessimistic -- Forlesen. It was a lot for us when we were recording the episodes over the span of a few weeks.
This was certainly an interesting story, I agree I liked the comparisons to Prometheus and Jesus.
I love Dr. Island, I started off liking him because Nicholas was so standoffish and Dr. Island acted so nice, of course, he reveals himself to be a false god in the end and Ignacio a false prophet. So yeah, this ends on a pretty dour note for the world and Nicholas. For what it is worth maybe Nicholas might have found some redemption by caring for Diana since through the story he was bottling up his feelings about the death of Maya and in the end, he finally mourned.
I agree, I found the line about praying to be a bit weird, but I am not sure that is what Wolfe believed. For what it is worth, I think Wolfe either held some interesting views or at least could entertain contrary positions because there have been a couple of moments in his stories that I definitely saw as being critical of faith and I had to do a double-take since I know he was pretty devout.
Wow, this is great. I didn't attach any significance to the name Maya ... even though we were doing that with every other name. It's interesting to think that we have two women associated with nature imagery and two men associated with fire imagery.
This may have been mentioned before elsewhere so forgive me if I'm repeating info. A small detail that stood out to me was the name that Maya gave the cleaning robot: "Corradora". We could read this as Nicholas' perceived spelling of the Spanish word "corredora" which means runner (fitting for a robot that runs around cleaning all day). The fact that she gave the robot a Spanish name suggests that Maya comes from a Spanish speaking country/colony in the stars.
In Spanish, the name Maya can mean "the end", which, and this is me making an assumption here, maybe references the Mayan calendar predicting the end of the world. This creates interesting implications with the idea of Ignacio representing some sort of Anti-Christ figure, and Nicholas' part in his release into society. Maya is also the feminine noun for "daisy," which represents childbirth, new beginnings, purity and are a composite flower (two flowers combined into one). This composite flower idea might further link Nicholas' guilt with Maya to Diane, whose name is strangely close to Daisy, and has a name origin in the Roman goddess Diana (or the Greek Artemis as mentioned), who is the goddess of the hunt, forests and childbirth. Continually, this feeds back into what has already been said of Ignacio meaning fire and Kenneth meaning born of fire, and the imagery of rebirth associated with fire/the phoenix.
I haven’t been around the forum much but the quote that strikes me as “true” in the story is when Dr Island says that ”men did this” - this is an Eden designed by a society concerned with faulty ideas of functionality above all; Ignacio is prized because he can theoretically create things like weapons with his intellect, and all of the precepts that Dr Island follows are geared to valuing some things at the great expense of others. Alas, Ignacio is not truly a functioning member of society. I think it is pretty clear that the more vile and primal instincts have won out entirely ; this is a pure tragedy - Paradise as made by flawed humans who do not understand what to value. Wolfe will play with the name Ignacio again in Pirate Freedom and it almost certainly implies damned to the fires of hell there. A ultilitarian Eden that winds up causing the most suffering for the most people when real values are inverted.
Brilliant comments, as always. You point to something that we really need to do, which is to think hard about Wolfe's concept of Eden -- the whole picture, what that pristine creation was like, what happened with the serpent, the Fall, Original Sin, the whole deal. Because it's everywhere in these 1970s pieces -- I think we're going to end up talking about in Tracking Song, too, which we're getting ready for. Certainly, it will be a topic for The Road So Far Part II, which we'll do in 2023 ...
Along these lines, I've never thought about Prometheus as an Adam before. Part of the connection with Christ is the graphic image of a person splayed out and tormented, but emphasizing the parallel with the forbidden knowledge is interesting.
We just recorded (but won't publish until August) an episode for Elder Sign on which my Lower Decks co-host, Valerie (who is a therapist), revisited some stories about mental health with me and diagnosed some fictional characters and discussed the practice of mental health-care in Algernon Blackwood and Thomas Ligotti. It might be fun to have her on to revisit this story with me along these same lines at some point, too.
Yeah, we certainly dropped the ball on thinking about the wordplay in the titles. We do plan, though, to do an entire episode about the Wolfe Archipelago when we've read them all (2028?), where we definitely will do exactly this sort of thing.