Re:For Zelda-playing daughter, Dad gives Link a sex change
by breadbox on Thursday November 08, 2012 @07:27PM
(#4760647)
Not quite. Achilles and the Tortoise originally came from an essay by Lewis Carroll. Hofstadter had borrowed them for GEB, and in doing so also borrowed their gender -- or so he thought. In reality when he went back to check, long after publication, he realized that Lewis Carroll had left the Tortoise completely genderless.
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Re:For Zelda-playing daughter, Dad gives Link a sex change
by wazoox on Friday November 09, 2012 @01:37PM
(#4764114)
I dug up the book to check, and in the 20th anniversary preface page 16 and 17, a few lines before the previous quote there is :
"Mr Tortoise, meet Madame Tortue A few years later, a wholly unexpected chance came along to make amends, at least in part, for my sexist sin."
And here comes the French translators part:"[...] they rather gingerly asked me if I would ever consider letting them switch the Tortoise's sex to female."
So I don't see what's the contradiction you're trying to point out.
Re:For Zelda-playing daughter, Dad gives Link a sex change
by breadbox on Friday November 09, 2012 @07:51PM
(#4765480)
Then it's probably my mix-up. An extremely similar passage occurs in Metamagical Themas, in which Hofstadter describes a conversation in which he first realized that he may have only assumed that Carroll's Tortoise was male. I've likely confused one with the other.