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... ... Oddly enough, a possible answer is at Wikipedia. "Some alchemists, impressed by this idea, speculated on the culture of the mandragore, and experimented in the artificia…
28 Nov 2011, 23:43
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Indeed. Yes. We trust he doesn't say it unless the figures /are/ the same in his mind and not just connected. The solution might be to avoid unusual senses of "is". I'd say ther…
23 Nov 2011, 05:10
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Just to make sure, have you read John Crowley? He's probably the most popular sf writer (after Wolfe) among current and former contributors to this list, including me. If you hav…
16 Nov 2011, 06:02
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I don't remember anything like that, but then I might not even if it were there. I gave examples below of people who should have seen them at the same age. (I haven't read /Home …
07 Nov 2011, 06:11
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All the continents but Africa have big grasslands at temperate latitudes and cold islands off their high-latitude coasts. I don't see these as "defining features", as you call them…
05 Nov 2011, 22:55
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Me neither. I have trouble imagining how Severian could think a person with a fifty- something head and a twenty-something head and body was born that way. But then I've long had …
05 Nov 2011, 21:44
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There are lots of places in the world where barbarity, cruelty, and despotism have been practiced. I doubt it would work that way for me (if I made it to the end). As everyone he…
05 Nov 2011, 20:16
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Scottish-ish, anyway. Jerry Friedman…
05 Nov 2011, 04:37
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The difficulty, of course, is knowing when he's doing it and when he's not. I see that several people have felt he's doing something unusual in this passage, which certainly streng…
04 Nov 2011, 23:29
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Ah, there it is, TrrW, Ch. 17. So much for my discrepancy. Jerry Friedman…
04 Nov 2011, 03:27
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Color and flavor. These things aren't incidental--you remember that BotNS started with a cool costume for a con, and the storyteller in "The Tale of the Rose and that Nightingale" …
04 Nov 2011, 03:18
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I read that passage quite differently from you. What's your evidence for a "struggle"? I'd think it more accurate to say that he thing that Silk tries to explain to himself is why…
03 Nov 2011, 21:44
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Or "climactic", as some prefer to spell it. When Severian is thinking about the coastal jungle, he's come "nearly to the waist of the world". So on a mirror image of South America…
03 Nov 2011, 05:05
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... Me too. Gyoll flows roughly south to the west coast of the continent. At the climatic scene on the beach when Severian takes his boots off (CotA, Ch. XXXI), "Land--Nessus, th…
02 Nov 2011, 22:39
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In view of Antonio's post, maybe I should give this a SPOILER WARNING. For instance, is it connected with Severian's mistaking the astral Silk for Master Malrubius? We can take Se…
01 Nov 2011, 22:47
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He hasn't said that, but certainly questioning why people don't agree with you is rude, as if they couldn't have a rational reason. And if one were to go farther and suggest psycho…
27 Oct 2011, 18:56
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What's your evidence for that? Surely it's?obvious that there's only one Crewman who does lots of time travel. (Since some people may not have noticed that Gerry was joking about …
26 Oct 2011, 17:32
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Oddly enough, Spanish influenza has been called "the forgotten pandemic". And mortality caused by it varied a lot from place to place. For instance, the early form was less deadly,…
23 Oct 2011, 05:25
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Seems to me some of it is explained straightforwardly (as I thought I posted earlier today, but I don't see the post). Famulimus says Baldanders "hoards up past lore" (SotL, Ch. XX…
23 Oct 2011, 04:18
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He's traveled a good deal. Are we told something about Dr. Talos's knowledge of those subjects? ... Famulimus says that Baldanders "hoards up past lore". I see no obstacle to Dr…
22 Oct 2011, 16:34
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... I admit I haven't read Paradise Lost, but I took a quick look at Book 2, lines 740-850 or so, which seemed promising. I saw where Satan had consensual sex with his daughter, S…
18 Oct 2011, 14:12
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... The excerpt from Proust is available at the WolfeWiki http://www.wolfewiki.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Stories.SuzanneDelage and there are more resemblances than the character's n…
17 Oct 2011, 20:47
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It is. ... Thanks--praise from Sir Hubert! ... Of course I don't really think that. Jerry Friedman…
16 Oct 2011, 05:22
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They can be missionaries for a religion that's like Christianity but not the same. They distinctly don't mention Jesus. The religion could use the (abridged) story of Moses's death…
15 Oct 2011, 14:50
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(And talking with the Autarch.) To my way of thinking, if "old and bent" is evidence that the servitor and the guide are Inire, it's evidence that Isangoma is not. I could never …
14 Oct 2011, 22:41
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Thanks!? I hope Brust didn't mix Wolfe up with King. I'd rather think Wolfe said something like that too. (But maybe my response is more appropriate to fiction than to reality.) J…
14 Oct 2011, 22:13
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Sorry, I meant "all the passages we've seen". It would also be remarkable for the ones that come up in the story to be limited to those sources. I've always seen that as a trans-…
14 Oct 2011, 19:43
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But this sort of thing is blurred by the quotations in the Atrium of Time. The Latin doesn't match Valeria's translations, so Wolfe has drawn attention to his fictitious translatio…
14 Oct 2011, 16:05
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It might be churlish of me to disagree when you're being so agreeable, but you've put your finger on the difference between our styles of interpretation. None of the hypotheses giv…
14 Oct 2011, 15:16
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Okay, I've got some time. In the real world, I'd say a surgical implant was the obvious possibility. How can producing different proteins make a brain capable of taking over other…
14 Oct 2011, 05:22
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An interesting exercise for some might be to consider all the mind control and telepathy in the Sun books. There's a lot, from the revolutionary, shown as purely technological, to …
13 Oct 2011, 04:31
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I don't have time to argue with you and Lee about this, so I hope we can agree to disagree. Jerry Friedman…
13 Oct 2011, 03:57
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For me, this resonates with the trilogy's theme of parent-child relations. Children absorb traits to some extent from their parents and other adults, so if we were nicer to childre…
11 Oct 2011, 22:57
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The fish is illuminated by an infrared source http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.0050277 and I'll bet the beautiful creatures on Flickr are too. In …
11 Oct 2011, 22:45
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... No matter how or whether Typhon sent his thoughts to far places, we know he's telepathic. He makes Severian see through his eyes, and he casts a spell to try to get Severian t…
11 Oct 2011, 05:25
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... The overseers being Seekers of Taste and Penitence? Jerry Friedman…
12 Aug 2011, 05:10
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... That is, the four Cornelius books in /The Cornelius Chronicles/. I deny that I ever read /The Cornelius Chronicles, Volume 2/ (and the second Amber series). Also, I'd say you …
10 Aug 2011, 04:52
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... That's a bit unfair, since Niven hardly wrote any of the Man-Kzin Wars. I don't remember /Ringworld/ as being especially sexist, but it does contain the line "Every woman has …
07 Aug 2011, 14:16
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Sauron and the Lord of the Nazgul. Are Tanith Lee's Lords of Darkness villains? I liked Mordred in /The Once and Future King/, and he seemed to rejoice, sort of, in his villainy.…
05 Aug 2011, 16:26
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I liked/Hyperion/, but was disappointed by the sequel. I seem to recall that the mysteries were better than the explanations, which I seem to recall contained a lot of quantum d…
04 Aug 2011, 20:54
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[women SF writers of the 70s feeling dated] I'd say a lot of the most admired male authors before the 70s--Heinlein, Asimov, Van Vogt (who I don't like), Anderson, Bradbury, Pohl…
02 Aug 2011, 23:01
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This comment strikes me as very strange. Atwood is still quite successful. I just finished /The Year of the Flood/ (set at the same time as /Oryx and Crake/), which there's not…
02 Aug 2011, 19:25
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Apologies if this has been posted before, but some here will enjoy this video of a puppet show by Philippe Genty. I recommend not reading the full description before watching it…
30 Jul 2011, 16:44
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Definitely, including the fact that they rule Ascia, reminiscent of the way Cthulhu et al. are worshiped by various humans and humanoids. I mentioned that a couple of times rece…
29 May 2011, 04:34
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And it works for guys who have or like to pretend they have builds they can show off. I can only think of folk songs--"Born beneath a shooting star" and "Sad experience teache…
25 May 2011, 14:30
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... Thanks for the reply. I think we'll have to disagree on what is simpler and what is more complicated, what is self-explanatory and what is a puzzle. But we seem to agree t…
25 May 2011, 14:21
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Somebody else used it. Likewise Lee Berman wrote "Jerry's problem with random excerpting" when he meant "Jeff's"--though of course I have that problem with GB and Amazon too. A…
24 May 2011, 21:05
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How about "disdain" or "misdirect"? As I recall, your point was about the final vowel. We usually don't make nicknames out of final syllables whose vowel is a schwa (though I di…
24 May 2011, 20:59
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The only pronunciation of "disdain" at the on-line Merriam-Webster and American Heritage dictionaries is with an /s/, though. I'll bet you have no trouble saying "smoke" or "Cass…
24 May 2011, 18:05
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It's not in the Frog story. Did you know you can search some of Wolfe's books at Google Books and at Amazon? I find this very useful. http://books.google.com/books?id=d-95ZlwCS…
24 May 2011, 17:58
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