Marathe and Steeply: the lethal-pleasure myths

The Entertainment universalized into myth — proof, Steeply argues, that the appetite isn't only American. He reaches for the pan-cultural legend of the blond-furred woman by the water whom no man can resist and no man survives: "the pleasure's too intense. No mortal can stand it." And the part he calls "analogous" is the part the whole theme turns on — "even the ones who know the pleasure of it will kill them, they go ahead anyway." That's the samizdat's mechanism restated as folklore, and restated as the p-terminal volunteers' behavior (096) and the Odalisque's victims: foreknowledge is no defense, because the wanting operates beneath knowing. The myths are humanity telling itself, across every culture, that there exists a pleasure lethal precisely because it cannot be refused — and the Entertainment is that myth engineered into a cartridge.