[ExI] Hugo Danner the Transhuman

[Lee Corbin]

Stuart our Avantguardian writes

> I thought [the SF story] "Gladiator" [by Wylie] was
> pretty well written for pulp fiction. Up to the end that is. What a
> disappointing ending for such a good story. It strikes me that Wylie sold out
> to bioconservatives and the Christian right in the last few pages of his novel.
> 
> I mean if Wylie wanted his tragic hero to commit suicide or something by
> climbing a mountain in a thunderstorm, that would still have been sad but
> preferable. But why go so far as invoke divine intervention in Hugo's death
> just as he was on the verge of an epiphany of purpose? Why turn such a
> visionary work into a cautionary tale against playing God?....
> 
> It's like SF in general can't get past Shelly's "Frankenstein" as the
> definitive moral guide to biotechnology. I mean it's acceptable in science
> fiction for the protagonist to kill any number of people by all manner of
> futuristic weaponry with the thinnest of justifications. But let one scientist
> create a new life-form and suddenly it's a crime against Nature that can only
> be amended by the death of the scientist or his creation.

Yes!  Just so!

> Am I the only one who sees the contradiction in that? When man plays an angry
> God and wages hi-tech war with great vengeance and furious anger, well that's
> ok . . . but let man play a loving God that brings a new lifeform into the
> world and he is committing blasphemy. At least Wylie could be said to have
> lived in a more innocent and ignorant time but what's Crichton's excuse?

My own fear is that they know what sells, what might make it as
a movie and so on.

> Maybe if scientists figured out a way to weaponize human embryos and kill
> millions of adults with them, the Christians would reverse their position on
> stem cell research. After all you don't see Christians complaining about
> nuclear weapons research do you?

Oh, that's far from the truth. You're overstating (and so weakening 
your claims). If scientists did find a way to weaponize embryos
and kill millions of people with them, the Christians (especially the
most devout) would be on all the rooftops shouting

" W E    T O L D    Y O U    S O  !  ! "

and it would be hard to say that they hadn't. "There are things man was
not meant to know!". 

You've definitely got the thing pegged with Frankenstein and Shelley.
I guess there was the Golem in Judaism. Unfortunately, there just 
seems to be something perverse in Western civilization that the
Japanese, say, appear to be quite as free from as were the ancient
Greeks.

> Death apparently holds no fear for Christians,
> it's only life they have seem to have a problem with.

Oh, it depends. On some days they babble endlessly about
the joys of heaven, yet on others cry hideously when some old
man dies of a painful cancer. Why aren't they joyously celebrating
when finally God has in his wisdom taken the poor man off
to heaven, (finally!) to reap his just reward?  The desert Muslims
do (or used to) I hear.

Lee