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Actually, the initial point of this thread was my objection to what I perceived the Short Sun books to be saying about colonialism. And I never said anything about "inbuilt nature…
30 May 2002, 13:57
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That comment struck me as strange. The idea seemed to be that if two books are set in the same universe and the protagonists can possibly meet, they have to do so (as if Balzac we…
30 May 2002, 13:57
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Yes, I remembered that post. I reread it the other day, and it's a good one. Yes, this was another of the things that provoked me to articulate my dissatisfaction. Of course, …
28 May 2002, 18:13
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It was specifically the view of relations between groups as an evolutionary struggle to the death that I denied was "reality." But no, I don't believe that love will conquer all. …
27 May 2002, 13:50
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I don't recall Quetzal well, but his attempt to stick to beef tea might well have been in order to avoid doing things that might get him caught, rather than out of compassion for h…
26 May 2002, 13:56
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I did remember that there were people who disliked TBOTSS. It was (and is) my impression that they are in the minority, at least among those who have spoken up on this list. And …
25 May 2002, 14:42
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I'm not sure the contrast between the two is as great as you make out; see below. While Horn may not have the miraculous powers of Sev (though he has weird talents of his own), I …
24 May 2002, 14:30
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To be sure. I don't regard that view of relations between groups to be "reality," though. But according to some historians (e. g. Joan Peters), the Palestinians were not displace…
24 May 2002, 14:30
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A psychological inability to do something can be just as real, and just as resistant to being overcome by force, as a physical inability. In fact Dollo's law refers not to organs …
23 May 2002, 14:30
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The OED gives as one meaning of "tie" for a dog and a bitch to be linked during copulation. But it's still strange. Marsch is an anthropologist; you'd expect him to have read abo…
22 May 2002, 15:05
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on 5/21/02 2:51 AM, Andy Robertson at andywrobertson at clara.co.uk wrote: (I'll refrain from comment upon hartshorn's excursus into real-world politics.) I don't deny that within t…
22 May 2002, 15:05
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Well, the books themselves contain doubts. And I still haven't seen a convincing explanation of why, if we are to take the Annese's existence for granted, there is not one single …
22 May 2002, 15:04
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Paging through my old messages, I came across the following year-old post by Andy Robertson: I've just consulted my copy of 5HC, and there's nothing in that passage about "binding…
21 May 2002, 02:16
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Iirc, these are all from the series of paperback tough-guy mysteries published under Queen's name, but without Ellery as the detective. http://www.hycyber.com/MYST/queen_ellery.ht…
21 May 2002, 02:03
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THE GARDEN BEHIND THE MOON, by Howard Pyle. A peculiar book: the titular garden behind the moon is not heaven, but a place where the souls of "simple" children play temporarily. …
21 May 2002, 01:58
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To pick a nit, 127 (Annese) years is the age of the trees when they were cut down, not when the French first arrived. When I first read your post, I assumed that the observatory w…
20 May 2002, 01:14
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I never bought the theory that Dollo's Law is a coded reference to either the abo's shapeshifting or the prehistoric colonists' evolution. As Jerry Friedman suggested, he only mea…
20 May 2002, 01:14
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Oops--I hadn't noticed this. Sorry, didn't mean to be redundant. Given that: 1) neither the National Union Catalog (hundreds of thick volumes compiling the card catalogs of the …
10 May 2002, 13:46
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This wouldn't account for Victor's "inability" to hold a pen correctly, though, since he received the same instruction all the other children did. Were the Australian aborigines, …
10 May 2002, 13:46
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That would certainly be a prime candidate. The first short novel in it, "Where Have You Been, Sandaliotis," is about forgery and contains a Master Forger. But checking the most l…
08 May 2002, 13:53
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So Wolfe is a Kai Lung fan. I had no idea. I've seen the "princess on a glass mountain" motif twice before: in a novel called THE GLASS MOUNTAIN by Leonard Wolf, which I haven't …
07 May 2002, 21:17
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Also in the opposition between the individualistic Sandwalker and the collectivist Marshmen and Shadow children: note also that Victor calls the mountain-dwelling Annese the Free P…
07 May 2002, 21:17
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To indicate something about Victor's character, perhaps? If the only purpose of "A Story" is to tell us about the prehistoric colonizations and the Shadow Children's shield, then …
07 May 2002, 02:02
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Because that is what Victor would naturally do if he were writing a fiction about the Annese. Presumably because he wants to portray Victor as a good writer of fiction, though a b…
06 May 2002, 03:33
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But what Victor is doing within the world of 5HC is analogous to what Wolfe did in Soldier. There is nothing to suggest that Silk is a fictional character invented by Horn, and su…
05 May 2002, 14:12
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But that's what writers of fiction do. The Soldier series must contain dozens of "externally verifiable" details, but we don't conclude that Latro existed. Even if we accept that…
04 May 2002, 14:21
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There is another possible explanation for the strange echoes between V.R.T. and Number Five: that Number Five has written all three parts, not just the first part. He wrote his au…
03 May 2002, 14:13
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This is an interesting bit of info, but it can't be literally true that Victor is one of the Shadow Children: he refers to his mother as one of the Free People (p. 240, Ace pb), wh…
02 May 2002, 15:45
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[snip] Apart from anything else, the OWO states explicitly that the Shadow Children's ancestors arrived in a "starcrosser" -- i.e. a spaceship (p. 125, Ace edition). --Adam…
01 May 2002, 14:13
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I'm one of "those," but I have to admit Wolfe has a point here, at least if you consider only death. The number of people in the 20th century killed by their own governments, or a…
01 May 2002, 14:13
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I got around to reading this. It's a good read, though hardly profound, but didn't strike me as particularly Wolfean. If I had to describe it in that manner, I'd call it a cross …
28 Apr 2002, 15:42
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Or else Wolfe, in expanding the 5HC novella, wanted to write a story about the Shadow Children, and decided to tie it in to parts 1 and 3 by having it be written by "John V. Marsch…
22 Apr 2002, 14:14
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I have a hard time reconciling this reading with the references in the SHADOW appendix to "a tongue that has not yet achieved existence" (unless we are supposed to believe that the…
22 Apr 2002, 14:14
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Is it possible that, since the sun is dim enough that the sky is black during the day, there are naturally no rainbows on Urth? "It occurred to me when I began _The Book of the Ne…
19 Apr 2002, 20:27
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In Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series vol. 9, Wolfe writes: "I sent him [Knight] a rather experimental story in which a series of reports by an astronaut and a series of le…
19 Apr 2002, 15:04
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Well, he isn't literally Jesus: he's not God, and his return isn't the Second Coming of Christ (and I've never understood how the events of UotNS are to be reconciled with the Chri…
19 Apr 2002, 15:04
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Interesting post by Marc. I didn't find any of the subtleties in PANDORA that Marc did; the few "clues" I did notice seemed to me to be just affectations leading nowhere. It stru…
16 Apr 2002, 14:10
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I read the review cited by Matthew Davis, in the Mar. 13 NYT, and in fact it praises Falin's poetry. Was there another NYT review? I'd call the review as a whole mixed rather tha…
02 Apr 2002, 15:29
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Frost read a poem at Kennedy's inauguration, referred to on p. 4 of THE TRANSLATOR (which also has another reference to the Shelley quote). Neither Falin's poems nor Kit's own poe…
01 Apr 2002, 16:48
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I was treating Blue and Green as analogous to Earth and Venus: completely independent orbits which remain fixed (i. e. don't oscillate). What you describe is more like mantis's tw…
29 Mar 2002, 20:04
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I don't know about that. I once looked at his afterword to a collection of his short stories (DANCE BAND ON THE TITANIC, iirc), and it was pretty self-important: he claimed that f…
28 Mar 2002, 21:20
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on 3/25/02 5:19 PM, Roy C. Lackey at rclackey at stic.net wrote: Thanks for digging these figures up! They indeed present serious difficulties. This last bit doesn't follow. It's…
28 Mar 2002, 21:20
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At one point there were four or five small presses publishing Lafferty's as-yet-unpublished works. Then, at about the same time (early 90s, I think) they all stopped. There are s…
26 Mar 2002, 03:00
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He could have run away; his choice is not between killing and dying, but between risking his life (by killing) and preserving it. But you're right that he undergoes a conversion. …
09 Mar 2002, 15:55
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That was my first thought too, but it doesn't really fit; if Peters dies where he falls there's no time for the fire to "scar" him. --Adam…
24 Feb 2002, 00:51
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I've been following the discussion with interest, but been busy; it's nice to be remembered. Anyway, I'll try to catch up. Yes; on p. 154 (Orb edition) the word occurs without a …
22 Feb 2002, 20:11
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There are plenty of conservative Catholics who believe that abolishing the Latin mass was a mistake. While there was rivalry between secular and ecclesiastical authority in the mi…
09 Feb 2002, 01:41
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Sorry this response is so late. As the only revolutionary leader in BOTNS, Vodalus represents the idea of revolution. If I read a book in which Lenin played a major role, and tur…
06 Feb 2002, 02:35
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I think you're mixing up the HRE and the Byzantine Empire. The HRE was never taken by the Turks; it was dissolved by Napoleon (who no doubt got labelled the Antichrist himself). …
06 Feb 2002, 02:35
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The Catholic intellectual tradition is wide and diverse. The Catholic Encyclopedia may state the "mainstream" position, but that doesn't oblige Wolfe to agree with it. Catholics …
03 Feb 2002, 15:35
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