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Hey everybody, Dan'l has a piece in the latest issue of "The New York Review of Science Fiction." It is about non-genre sf in the form of mysteries written by Nora Roberts. =man…
14 Jun 2001, 18:34
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Roy wrote Right, I was talking about the one in PEACE INDEXICON. I think we arrived at "1953" because 1) we had Olivia's death pegged at 1928 (kind of shocking in itself), which…
14 Jun 2001, 15:55
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Roy, Okay, we have a genuine timeline problem, since O RARE AMANDA was first published in 1954. How neat if our best anchor points (like Ludwig's biography of Napoleon) all come …
13 Jun 2001, 13:18
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Might be too tricky an entry for the Inivisible Library. HPL made it up (in the 20s, was it?) through allusions in his fiction. Gold "just wrote it" in the mid-50s, presumably bu…
13 Jun 2001, 12:48
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Which makes me think it might come out more like "Family Feuuud": "Survey says . . . BOOK OF THE NEW SUN is a good read!" <g> But that would be fine on two counts: it would still …
03 Jun 2001, 08:54
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Ah, this has been established (or otherwise achieved consensual validity in excess of 51%)? I hadn't known, I must have missed that . . . it poses a leap I cannot follow. =mantis…
31 May 2001, 19:33
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<fontfamily><param>Geneva</param><bigger><bigger>Roy, The Changer was experimented with by the General at least, we agree. What would be the results of such experiments, aside fr…
16 May 2001, 13:04
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To answer alga, Bloom's novel/homage to Arcturus is THE FLIGHT TO LUCIFER. I wish he would write a chapbook about A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS. (Waiting for the next digest to arrive.) …
14 May 2001, 06:15
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<fontfamily><param>Geneva</param><bigger><bigger>CHARACTERS New President: Marsha: wife of Boone Boone: was member of administration, killed himself over Jane Doe. General: ha…
10 May 2001, 06:49
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Hey, wow, I got an Urth digest! First time in a week or so, maybe? SPOILERS FOR COPPERHEAD Anyway, talking about "Copperhead." Jeff Wilson beat me to saying part of what I wan…
08 May 2001, 15:38
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Adam wrote about ENGINE SUMMER, including this bit: There is also the obvious metafictional answer: it is not for the angels, nor their city, but only for the reader of ENGINE SUM…
21 Apr 2001, 17:52
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New chapbooks! A chapbook on Gene Wolfe's PEACE! A chapbook on Gene Wolfe's THE FIFTH HEAD OF CERBERUS! A chapbook on all the fiction of John Crowley! Come see, come see! =man…
07 Apr 2001, 11:15
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As many of you probably recall, I have something of a mania about games. A few weeks ago I picked up a new one and I think it may be of interest around here, seeing as how much ti…
06 Mar 2001, 09:03
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"We're off to see the Shrike, the Wonderful Shrike of Hyperion! It really is a spike of a shrike, The Wonderful Shrike of Hyperion! If ever a swindlous spindle there hikes, Or tim…
28 Feb 2001, 11:12
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One possibility that I had in mind is that the colonies on Blue (and Green?) are now "grown up enough" that they do not need any further assistance from the starship, beyond the se…
26 Feb 2001, 17:21
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Well, =maybe= . . . I mean, I recall too well my own similar reaction to a possession in the Long Sun series, thinking that it must have been a goddess of war (Scylla or Spingx) ra…
24 Feb 2001, 19:32
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Right, that would be 0% Delusional for the narrator; the outsiders cannot grok it, but the Outsider can. I agree with just about all of the material you posted (I would go on more…
17 Feb 2001, 20:36
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Just talking to myself here, explaining two angles of the narrator, as I seem them. "Delusional" is the angle where 100% Silk is present in the narrator from the transfer moment f…
17 Feb 2001, 15:54
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Ah well. Interesting to contemplate two more-or-less identical Silks (your Silk-in-Pig and 100% Silk in Horn) in the same place (ruins of Blood's mansion) at the same time with su…
16 Feb 2001, 10:29
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If you had written "litHorn of TBOTLS is the literary creation of the narrator Horn; litHorn, of TBOTSS, is a literary creation of the narrator `N'" then I'd know we were on the sa…
15 Feb 2001, 11:50
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Wombat and Adam go on thusly: But you GUYS! HEY! Your sense of SILK is from the BOOK written by HORN and NETTLE! Crikies! There was even a little cliffhanger between volumes 1…
14 Feb 2001, 21:50
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Nick Gevers was the first to suggest that the arrival of Horn and co. at the citadel explains the guard's absence at the necropolis gate on the day that Severian nearly drowned (I,…
14 Feb 2001, 17:40
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Putting aside the godling issue as the lesser, I'm still working on how alga is bugged by Jahlee's death. Aside about Twain: well, we might agree he had some authorial mishap ther…
13 Feb 2001, 20:16
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IIRC, as Horn lay dying in the lander on Green, the deal expressed by the Neighbors was something like: from two broken men we will make one whole man. And since Horn's "broken" n…
13 Feb 2001, 12:56
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Eek! In my rush to express my intuition that the Silk-to-Horn/Silk transfer happened at a very specific point in the text (when Horn/Silk sees Pig face to face after the operation…
11 Feb 2001, 18:15
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Nacre, Right, there's that explanation: that Sev Armiger/Exultant was just a friend of the family, who provided a safe burial place when things got ugly. Maybe he was even the ch…
08 Feb 2001, 18:39
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Dan wrote, and Adam responded: Allow me to interject: I don't think that Horn was completely evacuated from the Horn/Silk/Silk combine (that is Horn spirit/Silk body/mainframe Sil…
08 Feb 2001, 09:52
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IIRC, both the numbers "around 300 years" and "around 1000 years" are from the text of TBOTLS (the calendar gives the former in precise detail, and a comment by a god gives the lat…
01 Feb 2001, 09:49
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Granted many details: the "just in time" arrival of the French greatly strains realism; that the inhabitants of Ste. Anne sense the cloaking effect as something in the sky (makes i…
23 Jan 2001, 08:28
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Talarican's burst of 5HC questions. Right. Issues of error all put to one side: In a nutshell, I think 402 days means that the twin planets are at the outer edge of the ecosphere…
22 Jan 2001, 20:12
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Hello KaguyaHime, I saw your November 2000 review of LEXICON URTHUS on Amazon.com. Because I have no way of contacting you otherwise, I'm leaving a public note for you here in th…
04 Jan 2001, 10:51
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Today I've been thinking of a pattern in Wolfe's fiction, that of twins, and most specifically a thing I am calling "phantom-twins." This is the category of twin-ness that is not …
21 Dec 2000, 17:59
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Talarican, Part of the situation here is: the C/A system had been overlooked, more distant stars explored and colonized (the planets, of course), at the time that the first French…
16 Dec 2000, 10:17
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Since nobody else is going to run with it, I must patiently point out that, much as we might like Sandwalker to be "Dopey" of the six dark dwarfs, in fact it is Dopey ("sacred" in …
15 Dec 2000, 11:31
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Talarican, Re: HARD SCIENCE ALERT! SENSITIVE PERSONS TAKE COVER! I agree with you, since I've done an investigative essay on the subject (in fact, I continue to work on it--latel…
15 Dec 2000, 07:41
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Adding to what I wrote before about the levels of organization for each of the groups, and the biomes they are restricted to; the anthropological terms are (or perhaps at one time …
14 Dec 2000, 20:43
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=Timeline for "A Story"= (13 years ago Eastwind and Sandwalker were born) Day 1: Sandwalker sets out Day 5: at noon he arrives at Thunder Always, has priest-given dream of East…
14 Dec 2000, 16:27
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Synchronicity moment, friends! "THE GOOD SOLDIER is, Eugene Goodheart claims, `one of the most puzzling works of modern fiction.' It is notoriously hard to make sense of Ford's ch…
04 Dec 2000, 12:43
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We see three or four groups in "A Story." It is interesting that none of them exhibit flashy shape-changing (rather than denying they have this ability, it points to VRT wanting t…
01 Dec 2000, 10:10
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I know we've all been through this before, but here's a new catalogue drawn mainly from "A Story." Each group has a biome or environment that they stay in, and other biomes that t…
30 Nov 2000, 11:15
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I agree that it gets very close to "too short for JM to feel the diff"; excellent point about the equinox (I hadn't even =thought= about seasonal effects on daylight--duh!) and ugh…
29 Nov 2000, 19:43
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First, PEACE and JURGEN. Maybe another point of interest is that Jurgen himself is a very accomplished liar, and he does it by quoting or alluding to texts by ancient authors--all…
29 Nov 2000, 13:40
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Not that I want to excuse Olivia's adulteries, but still I wonder at what might pressure her to do such things. We know that she is sexually active (having sex with Peacock and Ma…
28 Nov 2000, 15:27
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So Roy, About Tilly and Smart--so what do you think Smart's middle name is: "Tilly" (or "The"<g>)? Re: the gift and the giver, in the cases of the Chinese Egg and the pearls of G…
28 Nov 2000, 13:17
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Roy and Adam, While I'm thinking of it, here's another fuzzy factoid/episode from the "early president" period: that roadhouse where the workers go (152 for Roy; 162 for Adam). C…
18 Nov 2000, 10:39
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Adam and Roy, From how I see it, there isn't much to argue about here. First of all, Roy listed the detail about the knife under "fuzzy facts," as witness below. Each item in th…
18 Nov 2000, 10:12
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Another nail in the coffin of "Den birth year = 1920" is the fact that YEAR OF EGG HUNT = "height of China's warlord period" (which means after 1916 and before, oh, I don't know, s…
13 Nov 2000, 21:33
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Spectacled Bear wrote This has to do, I think, with the weird chthonic/cryptic linkage between the narrator of "V.R.T." and Number 5, the narrator of "The Fifth Head of Cerberus."…
13 Nov 2000, 07:54
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Technically speaking, I coined "Golden Year" for the supercluster "Den is President/Den is 50 (golden anniversary)/Pete on Island, 1963+/Sherry is 16/Lois & Gold affair" back when …
10 Nov 2000, 11:12
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I can go along with this very easily . . . =if= Den were 18 at the time of the accident! The problem is: the courtship started in high school; something pivotal happened at the pi…
09 Nov 2000, 14:15
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