scribblings of little or no consequence.

Right. Animals. Let's talk about animals. Animals as in the animals in the books we've been reading. Maybe by getting to know our fury friends we can learn a bit more about their less-hairy counterparts, or maybe, no the other hand, I'm just a bumbling idiot. Let's find out. If we follow Tony's handy syllabus we would get to "The Ticket that Exploded" before encountering any significant animal-characters. Morel seems only to have bugs (not to say that bugs are not important, they just are not particularly important to TIOM and therefore not entirely important to understanding the other characters.) and if there are any significant animals involved in Alterity that I am about to leave out, please forgive me, I still have a difficult time picking out the important parts of the book, but I do not think animals were invloved. At any rate, TTTE invloves several odd creatures, we could call them animals, actually I feel like we could call every character in that book an animal of sorts, with each one being almost as important to the plot as the next. Since I'm already on the subject of TTTE, let me go into the virus somewhat, as it seems unaviodable when TTTE comes up. this raises a potentially interesting question: does the virus make the characters in TTTE animalistic or were they that way before hand? (before-hand itself is an interesting concept in TTTE, one that I'm not sure I could describe, what was life like before the virus hit? did they live in a world like ours? Maybe its just the fact the world Burroughs has created is so incredibly different from our that it is difficult to compare it with anything we are familiar with) Animals and viruses both have that icredible desire to live and carry on that we only are aware of becuase we share it with the rest of them. Only two things have ever been so damn succesfull in doing so that they kick everyone else to the curb. I am of course referring back to viruses, as well as humans. Put the two of them together and you end up with machines telling men that they are viruses as well. TTTE gives us a world where everything seemingly has some version or mutation of the same virus, which is has either made the desicion not to, or is incapable of, destroying all life outright. Life therefore blunders on, and some of humanities more violent, animalistic tendencies have seems to come forward.
Next there's ribofunk, which although is also under complete control of the slightly different virus, the urb, has a distinct view of "animals" within its pages. The splices, or cultivars as they are also called, are main characters throughout the story, or rather stories. Of course to simply call them animals is rather ignorant of several of the main parts of the storyline in which these creatures are fighting for equal rights against there human creators. The splices hint at an ongoing struggle that has been occuring on this planet for quite some time. Di Filippo seems to be suggesting that even once humans have reached a tenative equality with thier own species, that they will simply create, or already have created, something else to subjecate. The fact the Di Filippo uses creatures that contain parts of human DNA make his take even more interesting. the most intruging example of these characters is little worker. (I personally wanted to learn more about krazy kat, but oh well) Little worker developed her own agenda somewhere down the line and accomplishes what she wants to with a combination of human wit and animal ferocity. I also feel the evnts that take place in "after school special" to be relevant here. We have two children who get "spikes" what we would call body alterations perhaps. this involves antlers for the boy and a column of coral for the girl, coral being of course a living thing. Even when they are inside the digital body learnig its anatomy they take the form of disney characters, many of which are based of animals. In a seperate chapter we have a girl who wants to become and giant cockroach. I find this desire to be animal-like among the Ribofunk human population very interesting when juxtapositioned beside the ferocity of the splices who are of less then fifty percent human DNA, which apparently makes them more animal like then the humans wish to become.

Thats all for now, allthough thats only two of the five books I still want to take a look at. If you actaully bothered to read this, I suppose you could expect more later.