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Precisely.…
22 Dec 2011, 16:25
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More specifically, outside the hobbyhorses of John W. Campbell, who also took up Dianetics, the Dean Drive, and the Hieronymus machine. He was a nutbar in his later years, but stil…
22 Dec 2011, 04:29
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The "Catholic Encyclopedia," while convenient, is actually no more authoritative than Wikipedia. The soul is the underlying principle which gives life to both body and mind.…
22 Dec 2011, 01:41
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I see the basic problem. You do not know the difference between a soul and a mind. I suggest you read some basic pneumatic theology.…
21 Dec 2011, 22:16
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Exactly so. The big distinction is between magia, the application of natural laws like sympathy and contagion; and goetia, dealings with supernatural powers. Some years ago I wrote…
21 Dec 2011, 21:30
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All of them. Correct. Not so fast. We get nothing from the point of view of a possessed person, except at a double remove (what is told to Silk, as re-related from him to the aut…
21 Dec 2011, 21:25
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No. The definition of evil is rejection of God or deliberate disobedience of His will. This _causes_ separation from God, which is the definition of damnation. And yet the Catholi…
21 Dec 2011, 19:44
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Because Wolfe is not such a fool as to offer a scientific (or psientific -- which can also mean "pseudo-scientific") explanation for the soul.…
21 Dec 2011, 19:12
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And yet Mucor's powers turn out to have a great deal to do with the soul. Magic. "I say it's spinach, and I say to hell with it." -- James Thurber…
21 Dec 2011, 18:35
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I'm reading _Green_ by Jay Lake. I would never have read it on my own; it looks like a generic D&D-style fantasy. But 100 pages in I'm very impressed. The language is almost Lupine…
21 Dec 2011, 17:49
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David just mentioned which reminded me of something I've been thinking for a while. Does the iterative and improving universe remind anyone else of Stapledon's _Star Maker_?…
21 Dec 2011, 17:47
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"psi" is a fancy word for magic.…
21 Dec 2011, 16:58
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It seems to me that what the sorcerers in the woods do is "real" magic.…
21 Dec 2011, 16:50
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The problem here is that you're trying to solve a puzzle in tBotNS with information that only became available in tUotNS. Wolfe is a deeply puzzling writer, but he deploys his clue…
21 Dec 2011, 16:43
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And afterwards sic our pets on him?…
20 Dec 2011, 22:21
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Ah, a subtilty that passed me by, and you were of course quite correct. 2011/12/20 Ant?nio Pedro Marques <entonio at gmail.com>:…
20 Dec 2011, 18:01
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Except, of course, for those things which _are_ set in stone for eternity -- as you say, those things which have already happened (like the Incarnaton), or are true eternally (like…
20 Dec 2011, 17:30
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Depends on which doctrines you mean. Those defined infallibly, are set in stone for eternity. As for the rest ... well, the Church, on the one hand, says that the time of public re…
20 Dec 2011, 16:28
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You could do worse than to start at the beginning. _Snow Crash_ is a very funny book, if you can deal with the kind of humor that names a book's main character "Hiro Protagonist." …
19 Dec 2011, 19:12
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Daniel, if you want to check out Stephenson, I would recommend starting with "Anathem," a book of deep secrets.…
19 Dec 2011, 18:41
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I have many favorite passages in tBotNS, all of which totally blow me away with the beauty of the language. My favorite, however, must be the passage in _Citadel_ where he realize…
19 Dec 2011, 18:17
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Omigawd. I agree with something Gerry said.…
18 Dec 2011, 01:27
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Fascinating, Marc. I won't comment in detail at this point because I have learned to take your theories seriously and with a LOT of thought, whether I wind up agreeing with them o…
17 Dec 2011, 01:13
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Possible, but it's more likely to be a nod to Ray Bradbury's "The Jar," which was made into an astonishing Alfred Hitchcock episode.…
17 Dec 2011, 00:48
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How could I forget Nutria? Oy.…
16 Dec 2011, 21:27
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I know what you mean ... when I joined we had (among others, simply from memory) Alice K. Turner ("Alga"), a former fiction editor at Playboy; and Michael Andre-Driussi ("Mantis"),…
16 Dec 2011, 21:01
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Ok, Sergei, I give up. Why did you send this to the list?…
16 Dec 2011, 20:19
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My good friend David Bratman, who is one of the world's leading experts on Tolkien (he writes the annual review of the JRRT secondary literature), posits that a primary difference …
16 Dec 2011, 17:30
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16 Dec 2011, 17:23
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Yes, and there is plenty of "high" fantasy that precedes JRRT also -- notably William Morris.…
16 Dec 2011, 17:21
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Thank you. You are absolutely correct, I meant "religious morality" and should have said so explicitly. I can't argue with this. I like to think Tolkien was in real life a bit mo…
16 Dec 2011, 05:17
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Contraconversely, understanding technology as magic, a la Clarke's Third Law, _also_ helps us see what's going on. Wolfe goes out of his way to provide a pseudoscientific explanati…
15 Dec 2011, 19:35
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Here are a few quick thoughts from someone who is a huge fan of the Inklings. * Tolkien built a massive world that existed independently of any given story told in it, and labored…
15 Dec 2011, 19:14
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Or else put it on the Web somewhere and just post a pointer to it.…
14 Dec 2011, 22:30
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No, no! On list!…
14 Dec 2011, 22:07
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Oh, you can have pictures on LinkedIn. And it helped me get my current job, so I'm all for it.…
13 Dec 2011, 22:13
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It appears that there may be something to the inheritance of acquired characteristics: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/12/111205102713.htm…
07 Dec 2011, 16:59
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Thank you for the pointer. An excellent essay.…
06 Dec 2011, 19:17
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We may only hope, but I doubt there will be any more. If the books had been more successful when the first two came out there would probably have been several. It's pretty deep an…
06 Dec 2011, 18:33
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Either is good, but if you haven't read the Latro books go for that.…
06 Dec 2011, 17:06
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Ummmm. Are you sure that Merryn is referring to the Cumaean? Or is she (perhaps without realizing it) referring to Severian?…
02 Dec 2011, 18:48
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What do you mean by "wrong" and "misled?" These seem to assume that there is a True Interpretation and all others are wrong, where I think that texts in general and Wolfe's texts i…
29 Nov 2011, 19:59
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Well, obviously they're the product of Wolfe's imagination; the question is to what extent, within the posited reality of Wolfe's imagination, we may rely upon what they say about …
29 Nov 2011, 17:11
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Which means that Horn and Nettle say so. To what extent may we rely upon their interpretation of this event?…
29 Nov 2011, 16:55
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Sorry, not the plural: the feminine.…
29 Nov 2011, 16:26
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Actually, it's the plural of "calculus," meaning "little stone."…
29 Nov 2011, 16:26
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You're missing my point. I put "face" in quotes because I don't believe for a moment that the face is the source of Silk's charisma. But I am suggesting that Typhon had the same pe…
28 Nov 2011, 21:09
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I think Silk's ability to lead/influence others IS the charisma Typhon associates with his face. The embryo that became Silk was a clone of Typhon into which he intended to d/l him…
28 Nov 2011, 18:16
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... This, to me, is the strongest argument for believing that the inhumi fly through space. They may be liars, but they all tell the same story on this, and, unless you believe th…
23 Nov 2011, 22:00
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OK, let's see if I can summarize this correctly. You believe that (a) the Neighbors are sentient trees native to Blue, who can astrally project into the form the Narrator meets; (…
23 Nov 2011, 19:18
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