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She remembered them clearly. She said so (at least regarding Molpe, and she didn't suggest that while Molpe's image was clear, that of the Monarch was a blur). She would have k…
19 Jan 2011, 01:07
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----- Original Message ----- Wolfe gave Cramer a namecheck in the short story Procreation. - Gerry Quinn…
19 Jan 2011, 00:54
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You are purposely misrepresenting what I said (and not for the first time). Here's what I *actually* asserted: - Gerry Quinn…
18 Jan 2011, 23:10
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From: "James Wynn" <crushtv at gmail.com> that? No - she calls him the Monarch. and she remembers Molpe, although evidently not by that name: "One was small, the Monarch's seco…
18 Jan 2011, 23:04
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----- Original Message ----- From: Matthew Weber No question. And the classification, postwar, of certain Americans as "premature anti-fascists" as well. The truth of thi…
18 Jan 2011, 22:27
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That seems a highly unlikely assertion. Got any statistics to back it up? - Gerry Quinn…
18 Jan 2011, 22:24
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Both Silk and Typhon also have two legs, ALSO allowing for the possibility of a connection. With multiple clues like this, their identity is surely alnost proven! But wait.... …
18 Jan 2011, 22:11
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Roy's exegesis of why Silk can't be a clone of Pas is solid, IMO. It's not quite so simple to discount Horn's words IMO. Sure, he is a character who is standing in for the autho…
18 Jan 2011, 21:51
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I read about this recently. My biggest issue with it was the publisher's intention of replacing "nigger" with "slave" which is hardly synonymous. Replacing it with "African Amer…
18 Jan 2011, 21:14
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If you are going to call me a liar, there is no need for a preamble telling me that you will take my word. As for my motives, I'm here because I'm interested in discussing the wo…
18 Jan 2011, 21:08
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The block towers of small children were not the metaphor. Nor do I delight in knocking them down. When some adult constructs something which they intend to be part of a load-be…
18 Jan 2011, 01:06
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Why do I feel the sky is blue? Because alternatives are disturbing to me? Or maybe, just maybe, because it's blue. We *are* talking about science fiction stories here, not the K…
17 Jan 2011, 20:29
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From: "Marc Aramini" <marcaramini at yahoo.com> It's a long time since I read Peace, and I can't remember whether I had already been exposed to other peoples' ideas about it or n…
17 Jan 2011, 18:49
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Some of it surely is for psychological realism. Certainly Silk makes some equations in dreams that cannot be taken literally. They aren't included for no reason. It's a big boo…
17 Jan 2011, 04:24
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From: James Wynn Making Tussah a liar about the "son not born of my body". But aside from that, wouldn't at least one of the councillors (who knew Tussah and were lookoing for h…
17 Jan 2011, 01:38
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----- Original Message ----- I dont see a need for another explanation. Severian often goes on like this, for example insisting that a guy with two heads is the most cosmically…
17 Jan 2011, 01:21
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Spider says he's dead. The implication seemed to be that he buried him in the tunnels, but I don;t think it was said for definite. - Gerry Quinn…
17 Jan 2011, 01:00
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My impression was that Severian's ability to walk the corridors terminated with the formation of Ushas, but I could be wrong. One obvious possibility (probability, even?) is tha…
17 Jan 2011, 00:53
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From: "Marc Aramini" <marcaramini at yahoo.com> What I seem to remember is reading a while ago that this baffled everyone on the list for a long time, until Wolfe pointed out thi…
16 Jan 2011, 18:07
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Correct about homeothermy and movement. As has been noted before, Wolfe is not writing hard SF, for most authors of which this would be a slight stumbling block. As for Severian…
16 Jan 2011, 18:01
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I can think of a lot of reasons, but the simplest is that he was at the point of dying and not in the best situation to plan and carry out a tricky double-bluff. Or, in fact, he…
16 Jan 2011, 17:27
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It doesn't affect their likelihood to escape. All motion is relative. Those are molecules that don't escape. The ones we care about are ones which achieve escape velocity near …
16 Jan 2011, 12:31
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When she is confused about her name, though, she has just slept for two centuries, and woken up possessed by Mucor. Even without a brain operation, I think that would leave anyo…
15 Jan 2011, 22:00
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That's a pretty abstract sense for 'citadel'. And how does "prime calcula-" fit in? It's hard to know what Echidna is talking about exactly, but the simplest interpretation see…
15 Jan 2011, 18:35
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Maybe so... but her memories aren't very suggestive of Typhon's concubine Kypris. And she hasn't had them wiped, because she remembers events to do with being transported to the…
15 Jan 2011, 18:16
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So suck it up and send it back! Seriously, will this actually happen, anyway? I couldn't find detailed references to a proper calculation, but here are my thoughts: If an atom …
15 Jan 2011, 17:50
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That seems reasonable, though it could simply be an artefact of Severian's rather extensive... coverage. - Gerry Quinn…
15 Jan 2011, 16:36
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Severian may exaggerate his sexual prowess, but he does not indicate that he is unable to perform sexually, as one would expect of a castrated man. It seems unlikely that he wou…
14 Jan 2011, 21:18
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The numbers inside Maytera Marble's head, I think. "Calcula" does not seem to be a word. I think it refers to "the prime calculator", i.e. the central processing unit of Mainfra…
14 Jan 2011, 21:00
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Of course, if humans could accelerate the Whorl to relativistic speeds, they could also have spun up the Moon to have a shorter day-night cycle, more suited to plant growth. If …
13 Jan 2011, 18:21
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How much power does it take to maintain an atmospheric-retention forcefield? Are some models more efficient than others? But there is always the more lo-tech option of giant pres…
12 Jan 2011, 18:40
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The most probable explanation, I think, is that Wolfe has got his orbital mechanics wrong and assumed the Moon will come closer to Earth over time. (In fact it will drain energy …
12 Jan 2011, 13:56
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It seems to me there could be many reasons, and there doesn't seem anything in the book to support the notion that Fomalhaut is some sort of 'twin' of Sol. Possibly Wolfe just p…
12 Jan 2011, 02:58
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If Lune is still green with plant life, presumably civilisation is sustainable there also. - Gerry Quinn…
12 Jan 2011, 02:06
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We know why. But what has that to do with Fomalhaut? What obvious conclusions can we draw? That there is a black hole in Fomalhaut too? Feel free to explain how this "spiritua…
12 Jan 2011, 02:03
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That's not really feasible for stars within a single galaxy - as far as I can see you'd have to be in close orbit around a really gigantic black hole, which would fill most of th…
12 Jan 2011, 00:23
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We don't know much about civilisation elsewhere on Urth - the only description of Ascian society is from the story of a captured soldier from there. If the Commonwealth is Sout…
12 Jan 2011, 00:16
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----- Original Message ----- From: Jordon Flato On Tue, Jan 11, 2011 at 1:54 PM, DAVID STOCKHOFF <dstockhoff at verizon.net> wrote: Yet Severian refers to the forests of…
11 Jan 2011, 22:13
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One can also imagine a scenario in which someone claims to have an invisible turnip in his kidney, and when others doubt this assertion, he insists that they are attacking his so…
11 Jan 2011, 20:47
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We see a picture of the Apollo landings "before it was irrigated". It's the Moon. - Gerry Quinn…
11 Jan 2011, 19:15
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But it can't be. Lune is orbiting Urth in Severian's time, and is green in colour. The Whorl was launched long before that time, when Scylla was alive - and the Whorl has no su…
11 Jan 2011, 19:02
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Is it likely that Wolfe had even thought of Blue and Green when he wrote BotNS and UotNS? A satellite of a body is just something that orbits that body. The Moon is a satellite…
11 Jan 2011, 18:49
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The one that bugs me the most is what was it that Kulili showed Abel at the bottom of the sea? The plug? The corpse of someone significant? - Gerry Quinn…
10 Jan 2011, 15:46
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What we read is written by the shapeshifting alien who replaces Marsch in the lingua franca of Sainte Anne and Sainte Croix, which I assume to be English (this is not entirely clea…
09 Jan 2011, 16:53
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Gene Wolfe's tripartite novel, _The Fifth Head of Cerberus_, has excited and exasperated all those who have tried to interpret it in the thirty years since it was written. The m…
09 Jan 2011, 16:52
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I don't know if we can say for sure that Pas wants an heir as such. We are told that Typhon knocked many sprogs out of Echidna in the hopes of getting an unblemished male heir. B…
08 Jan 2011, 21:25
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----- Original Message ----- How do you mean, "translated"? We have a text, presumably written by VRT in English, in which he uses the word "death" (or words derived from the s…
08 Jan 2011, 20:37
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If you always lean towards the most fantastic view, and also get bent out of shape whenever people disagree with you, you are apt to have a hard time. I would have thought that t…
08 Jan 2011, 02:01
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While I agree that they are the natives, I don;t think the John/Mary thing is very strong, as it could be a sort an equivalent of mister/missus, or like some sort of saint's name…
08 Jan 2011, 01:45
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Interesting. I hadn't thought much about his mother, but I think you are right that she seems to be comparatively stronger on shapechanging and he on tools. Whether that makes …
08 Jan 2011, 01:40
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