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Hmmm. This (?) answers the question: Typhon and Baldanders are the same person? I must have slept through that. =mantis=…
07 Sep 2003, 03:10
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While I'm not myself so interested in "this casual talk of cloning," and thus do not want to be seen as defending it, still, the point of Roy and Andrew that Typhon could have used…
06 Sep 2003, 17:32
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No, no -- I forgot to mention the corn meal gruel at the shepherd's shelter between Mount Typhon and Lake Diuturna. Now I'm obsessive. =mantis=…
22 Aug 2003, 02:17
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Ahem. In Long Sun I remember the fried green tomatoes (Silk salivating over) and watercress sandwiches (that Hyacinth would never eat, remembering the drudgery of harvesting water…
21 Aug 2003, 16:23
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I guess I'm just a sucker for Thea's story about Skuld as "the world of the future." <g> It does seem to me that Skuld would be the planet in the solar system most likely to be in…
18 Aug 2003, 17:41
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Andrew, for starters you seem to be insisting that Typhon's post-Urth capital will be in another star system. I, for one, have always assumed it would be on Skuld, our Venus terra…
16 Aug 2003, 03:10
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Le Guin's main sf work has been set in a common STL interstellar culture. One of the things that is suggested if not stated outright is that it is only possible because they use an…
14 Aug 2003, 23:58
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One of the few residual pleasures from my sentence (objectively short/subjectively long) as a small press magazine editor/co-owner was granted to me just a few weeks ago when I too…
14 Aug 2003, 23:14
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I will answer the last part: PLAN[E]T ENGINEERING is a book published by NESFA Press in 1984. The first essay in this book is "Books in THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN." That is the essa…
08 Aug 2003, 15:03
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The hidden book is (Canog's) THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN. (See Wolfe's essay in PLAN[E]T ENGINEERING for more details.) =mantis=…
07 Aug 2003, 23:21
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to little Severian, perhaps around Lake Diuturna, where both <italic>Terminus Est</italic> and the Claw are destroyed? Citadel, chapter 34: Severian still has it when he returns t…
07 Aug 2003, 16:41
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Maybe elsewhere, as well, but certainly from Borges's THE BOOK OF IMAGINARY BEINGS, entry "Fauna of Mirrors." Not to forget entry "Baldanders" (Gene Wolfe claims, in CASTLE OF THE…
29 Jul 2003, 19:42
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In an attempt to calm the waters (not without some risk), I'd like to shift the topic a bit. A week ago Josh asked/made his statement about Baldanders being based on Delany as cle…
28 Jul 2003, 19:48
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Wasn't someone mentioning fairly recently that we don't know what happened during Severian's Year as an Ascian Slave? One of the few things we know about that period of Severian's…
21 Jul 2003, 21:26
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Now hang on, there: the unalterable reason why Malrubius was chosen over Palaemon is the fact that Malrubius is already dead, in the timeframe, and a logical candidate for a ghost …
18 Jul 2003, 19:36
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I can go along with this, because I think you are saying that Severian saw a ghost-like Silk (as shown in BOTSS) and later in TBOTNS saw a ghost which he reported as being that of …
18 Jul 2003, 16:46
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Right. I wasn't saying that I agreed with Clute's examination of The Book as a political document, I was just saying that he had published that more than 12 years ago. FWIW. But…
10 Jul 2003, 14:24
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I want to point out that John Clute first raised the interpretation of The Book as political. His essay is in STROKES, a collection of his essays and reviews. This raises the que…
09 Jul 2003, 19:40
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Who is that shadowy man striding always 15 years ahead of you? It is my future self, sending me hints for threading the maze that is being built up around me. In TBOTNS, narrativ…
09 Jul 2003, 14:52
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Yes, I covered this in "Additions, Errata, &cetera" volumes 2 and 3. There is definitely a body for "sailor Severian" on the ship Tzadkiel, and one for Apu-Punchau in the Age of M…
09 Jul 2003, 14:28
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(She means "Tzadkiel," not "Samru.") What ho! And Twain echoed, iirc, none other than Christopher Columbus -- who might not have gotten such great reviews, but most likely had th…
08 Jul 2003, 20:32
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Because I have a hard time envisioning the Claw as either a dumb object or as a mere "focus" for Severian's current/latent power, I tend to think (insist) that the Claw is the (hol…
06 Jul 2003, 03:19
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Just a note to say that the last three Lexicon auctions on eBay will end tomorrow. =mantis= Washington Post brief review of SNAKE'S-HANDS a book I co-edited with Alice Turner htt…
06 Jul 2003, 03:16
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Yes, I did think of "The New Prime," which is an interesting story for a number of reasons. But as you say, the worlds are very sketchy -- this is not detrimental to the story at …
28 Jun 2003, 15:52
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Normally I would agree with you, except for three points: 1) the categorical distinctions are made professionally for publication and (subsequently) awards, even if we readers don…
27 Jun 2003, 19:54
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Now this is something I find interesting, and I don't recall it coming up before. Yes, the limitations of the short form -- for example, it seems to be more or less impossible for…
25 Jun 2003, 18:53
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No, there is only the one piece from Wolfe, an excerpt from KNIGHT. =mantis=…
25 Jun 2003, 18:08
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Nick Gevers told us about the perfect-bound magazine/anthology "Conjunctions: 39" back in October, I think it was, in this forum because it has an excerpt from Wolfe's next book, K…
25 Jun 2003, 14:19
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Nessus-the-mobile, the Citadel, and the enigmatic Wall. For simplicity's sake, let's suppose that the citadel is located in the exact center of a circular Wall. Now then, in Typh…
19 Jun 2003, 21:19
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Sorry, no diabusing from me! I'll just spur you on -- you haven't gone far enough yet! (Well except for the Whorl lifting off from Urth; I'll agree that seems unlikely.) Fact: t…
19 Jun 2003, 18:13
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Not to give you a hard time, and granted there is always argument between historians, but I just read a book, THE FATES OF NATIONS: A BIOLOGICAL THEORY OF HISTORY (1980), where the…
17 Jun 2003, 18:34
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Me, I just give him the text bits he needs. Nope, not me (not recently, at least). Somebody else. Today's fortune cookie tip: In the text at the end it is capital-G God. =manti…
13 May 2003, 17:06
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Normally I'd agree with you about ignoring all that stuff, but for the odd detail that the Japanese Army had occupied the island during the Pacific War. I don't know if this tidbi…
10 May 2003, 18:36
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Wow, Nigel, you have suddenly burst into high activity! I can help you there: Baden Rev. Rob Robbins (his first name is really "Mervyn") Annys (witch in L.A.) Julius R. Christmas…
10 May 2003, 14:28
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Welcome, Oren. The characters at this point are: Roche (Drotte's lieutenant), Drotte (the captain of the apprentices), Eata (the littlest one), and Severian. The sequence goes li…
24 Apr 2003, 00:34
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"I had been . . . quick and clumsy with Jolenta (whom I might have been said to have raped, though I believed then and believe still that she wished it)" (URTH, ch. XXVII, p. 190).…
22 Apr 2003, 00:23
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Before things spin any further away and out . . . . . . the source of the charge of the possibility of Jolenta's rape . . . . . . is none other than Severian himself, in URTH (ii…
21 Apr 2003, 21:59
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In pursuit of accuracy: A READER'S GUIDE TO SCIENCE FICTION by Baird Searles, Martin Last, Beth Meacham, and Michael Franklin; published in 1979. With regard to the material found…
17 Apr 2003, 16:10
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Writing about the Z and Y series, Jeff Wilson asked: More like yours is the annonymous ancestor to all the others, the first to escape the "to burn box"! (I really was going to d…
13 Apr 2003, 14:58
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I do not know about the availabilty of standard copies, but I've been auctioning-off "less-than-perfect" copies on eBay. (Each one has all the pages, is legible, and all that. It…
12 Apr 2003, 19:44
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About a month ago, our friend Nigel Price (a person who can find all sorts Nigel, I have no idea! Even after looking around, I still have no idea. Where did you get the idea? Pl…
25 Mar 2003, 01:13
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The story is in THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR DEATH AND OTHER STORIES AND OTHER STORIES. IIRC the story has been covered a bit here in the past -- you might check the archives and see what…
17 Mar 2003, 15:01
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I googled "Marea" before, if I didn't mention it, and one of the interesting things that bubbled up was a town of that name, in ancient Egypt. Located, iirc, to the west of the Ni…
09 Mar 2003, 18:24
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In THERE ARE DOORS there's that scene at the map store where Green is trying to buy a map of Overwood and the clerk mentions maps for "Slumberland, Disneyland, Cleveland, and Heave…
06 Mar 2003, 23:09
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To begin, I did not intend to badger Adam Stephanides at all, and if that is how it was taken by anybody then I apologize. Of course I thought of these examples, too, but I though…
19 Feb 2003, 22:40
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The question came up: I think what you mean is more "thought experiment" or "extrapolation of a technological advance and how it would change society" -- when I first saw "writing…
19 Feb 2003, 16:54
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Good guess, but I think "Straw" (collected in STOREYS FROM THE OLD HOTEL) is the one in question. =mantis=…
19 Feb 2003, 16:35
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Because I don't know what you are "pointing at" when you say "genuine love." If I don't know this, then my approach is limited to a shrug. I cannot comment if I do not grasp the …
18 Feb 2003, 15:37
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It would be easier (or should that be "possible"?) to approach this if I had some examples of a few authors inside and outside of genre who write fiction about love (monolithic or …
16 Feb 2003, 22:46
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No bells ringing for me, aside from a progression from early Winter into mid-Spring. <LOL> Yeah, that restaurant-between-worlds plays hell with employee break-times, too. Step o…
12 Feb 2003, 22:01
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