Posted by P. Dusoulier on April 14, 1998 at 13:16:09:
In Reply to: Re: To Live Forever -- Cloning and the Hero posted by willem on April 12, 1998 at 12:18:24:
Willem replied to The Professor :
": Professor: Later in the book he is troubled as being a monster, but his rage is coming from the occasion that they had no mercy on him.He is thinking about their possible resurrection. He is the person causing the accident but as the Amaranth have a clone available the person murdered does not die in the sense we consider somebody dead when murdered.
: Waylock uses the back ups as rationalization of the murders he commits.
: To live forever is one of his best books [imo], amazingly up to date and worth a reread."
Willem : I entirely agree with you. That long exchange of remarks and opinions on TLF led me to reread it too : a great book, very deep. I sympathise with Waylock, poor guy thwarted in his legitimate pursuits and ambitions by an aristocratic elite... JV shows very well the extremes to which a meritocracy can lead. It's as bad as aristocracy (we french cut their heads off, haha ! ). In fact, any system is bad that leads to any kind of elite with privileges, any superior caste that can dominate others (to anticipate reactions, let me hasten to add that I include the practiced form of communism in this). I'm afraid the conclusion to my statement is that there's no good system cuurently in operation (ref the famous saying about democracy ... Winston Churchill, was it ?)
It's interesting to see that JV depicts those Amaranths as rather spoiled children, overall, with the notable exception of the Jacynth Martin. A sad comment on what people actually would/will do with immortality ...
Has anybody yet remarked on a certain analogy with EC Tubb's TECHNOS, one of the early Dumarest novels ? Same concept of meritocracy (gaining grades and diplomas), with the final bonus of immortality, but much more dreadful than in JV's novel : EC TUBB imagines that those elite people get their heads transplanted onto youthful bodies (imported from other planets)... Uuurghhh ... The cloning system is fine in comparison !
P.