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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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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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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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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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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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(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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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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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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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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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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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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"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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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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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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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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Hey, that book seminar sounds like a lot of fun! As for the charts. IIRC, the aliens are kinda sorta robotic rather than "pure thought" A.I. entities. Possible reasons for physi…
11 Feb 2003, 16:28
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as a feeble joke. In fact the ancient Roman calendar is very tricky to me. Let's see, in March the nones falls on the 7th and the ides falls on the 15th. March 22 -- 8th day bef…
10 Feb 2003, 17:22
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Roy Lackey, regarding the nurse accomplice, wrote Maybe. But I think this would be ruined by the bush-mail system: every patient already knows that Gloria got Al, so she's alread…
09 Feb 2003, 22:06
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The only quibble I have is that, very technically, the real Greek "siren" was not a mermaid but (yet another) woman-headed bird (see also harpies). I often make the mistake of thin…
09 Feb 2003, 03:54
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Yes, I did think North was trying to kill Lara, and it is still a possibility. The problem was this: North seems so "political" in his action, and I could not see much point in No…
09 Feb 2003, 03:54
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LEUCOTHEA One of Lara's names is "Leucothea Fitzhugh Hurst" (276). "The most warlike of the remaining Pelasgians were the Centaurs of Magnesia, whose clan totems included the wryn…
07 Feb 2003, 22:27
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So we are all in agreement that the narrator is female? =mantis=…
07 Feb 2003, 18:23
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It is a given that the American Civil War did not happen in Otherworld, and as a result there is still slavery. (I think this also suggests that the O-USA is far more agrarian, le…
04 Feb 2003, 00:19
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I mentioned the fiction of Samuel R. Delany before, and since then it has occured to me that it would be a real scream if Green's hidden/encrypted name were decoded as "William Dha…
29 Jan 2003, 14:51
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True, but I was referring to messages before that one (and that one still doesn't capture what I thought I remembered). My fault. (And now to argue: if the doll is a socialization…
29 Jan 2003, 00:13
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That is one of the funnier and puzzling bits (I could've sworn Roy Lackey was complaining about Tina's Daddy knowledge as being a weird bending/blending of the worlds where there s…
28 Jan 2003, 16:15
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Hello there John Vik, That sailor is Hethor, and his "crazy" speech contains perhaps our first glimpse of the many faces of Tzadkiel, who is captain and figurehead and ship and mo…
24 Jan 2003, 17:56
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Yes, something like 14.67, nearly double the previous rate of 8.25 (or at least it is still higher than the probably more accurate 11:1 ratio proposed by Stone Ox). So do we agree…
23 Jan 2003, 17:03
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First I'd like to give my sense of the dolls, as I've been meaning to do Previously I pointed out that women are pretty much against men having dolls: they will destroy them (the …
23 Jan 2003, 17:00
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Ah yes: "Post coitum omne animal triste." Tami Whitehead pointed out the Gravesean 13-month lunar calendar in THE WHITE GODDESS. Yes, precisely: the thing is there, already made,…
22 Jan 2003, 02:04
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Respectfully I disagree. The intriguing "Viridian" passage at the beginning of the book might at first seem like a Wolfean lexical exercise -- "Typical," one might say. Erudite. …
21 Jan 2003, 17:18
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Probably. If the question is "what number(s) am I using for a month in these figurings," I've been pretty lax -- sometimes using 28 days, often using 30 days. No, wait: if the Ot…
21 Jan 2003, 14:31
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Well, ah . . . the "doors" themselves are all copper! The frame on the street that he passes through the first time, which is the one that is being dismantled when he next returns…
21 Jan 2003, 05:59
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I understand. Another possible spin at that early stage is that "Green" is the name of a persona (of an unhinged person who thinks he is someone else) or a personality of a man wi…
21 Jan 2003, 03:20
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Right, I've been puzzling over that "3 Christmases" thing. At first I thought it was less than one year (since Green is extra loopy at that stage and "Christmas" as he is describi…
18 Jan 2003, 06:31
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Exactly. The differences being that Silk is intelligent and highly educated (in contrast to dumb Green), Silk is melancholic (Green seems optimistic), and Silk sees through the ma…
17 Jan 2003, 03:31
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Hey Roy! (And everybody else.) What you think -- is the city of TAD the same city as the one in FLF? The city in TAD is: -- On the eastern seaboard. -- Far enough north that th…
17 Jan 2003, 01:16
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Glad you wrote that: it occured to me after I'd posted, so now at least two of us are thinking it. OTOH, it would be a clincher if the tattoo were "RMN," since North is clear on t…
16 Jan 2003, 17:27
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Right. It is a pagan-sympathetic novel, even more so than the Soldier books set in pre-Christian times. In that interview that Nutria performed, Nutria made a sketch or two at li…
15 Jan 2003, 19:57
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In the big "White Goddess" pattern of Robert Graves, the goddess has a place out west (direction of sunset, i.e., place where sun dies) that mortals cannot visit. It is appleland,…
15 Jan 2003, 05:27
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So far people have been mainly wondering about the hero's name (singular). This is valid, of course, and could lead to something, but it seems at the moment to be a (perhaps tempor…
14 Jan 2003, 21:53
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If the quadrumvirate rules over the microverse Oz-as-house (validating the paranormal thread present at the beginning of the book yet gradually abandoned for the scientific/conspir…
23 Dec 2002, 17:19
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