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Well call me bushwacked. <Curious to see what Professor Jerry will say about using t and t(o).> =mantis=…
03 Dec 2002, 00:34
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Unless you are trying to tell me that there is no time dilation at relativistic speeds, which would be an interesting claim, then this looks to be another flea circumcising exercis…
03 Dec 2002, 00:30
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Um, no, Jerry . . . when the Whorl is at rest, the Whorl people experience time at the same flow as people on Urth or Blue or Green, but at near-light speeds subjective time (the p…
02 Dec 2002, 22:58
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Which is funny, because I did detect odd flashes of Heinlein in FLF, mainly in the kitchen's "door into summer" image, but also the sort of Libertarian reading that Adam Stephanide…
02 Dec 2002, 22:28
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Hmmm. The text is pretty clear that the Objective Time has been 1000 years (LS3, ch 6, p. 242) and the Subjective Time has been 332 years (date on letters). If we assume that the…
02 Dec 2002, 20:59
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Blattid wants new numbers. Okay! A 10:1 time dilation suggests somewhere between .98 c and .99 c, I reckon. OBJECTIVE SUBJECTIVE LEG RATE TIME T…
02 Dec 2002, 18:46
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Oh, oh! In 1997 I worked out the distance as 930 light years, but that was without figuring a hundred years in parking orbit. If we factor that in, so the journey is only around …
02 Dec 2002, 18:17
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Good catch! That does narrow things down quite a bit. I agree, but rather than "circle" I think it more kind of hovers. (For the time travel from High Country 1942 to High Count…
02 Dec 2002, 15:30
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I said before that Dr. Makee made it sound like he'd known Free for decades. Nope, only a few years according to my hc (207). Let's say that Free moves into the house in 1980. O…
02 Dec 2002, 06:14
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My impression was that the house gizmo is not adjusted, it is set to a fixed time, which might be less of a year A.D. than it is a span of years (for example, going from 1942 to 19…
01 Dec 2002, 17:40
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That is an interesting parallel, and I'll leave it to our Oz experts to say how Narnia might be a British "Oz." For the couples I was mentioning before, well, the Narnia four are …
01 Dec 2002, 00:30
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Right, there is a lot packed into that tiny epilogue. 1. The nature of the house: what year is it in that final kitchen? If it is 1982, then Ben Free has not died yet! Talk abo…
29 Nov 2002, 22:54
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Well that is true and worth pointing out. OTOH, Free does speak about his impending murder. The one detail I believe you are missing is that the "seven years" is actually an unsp…
26 Nov 2002, 19:33
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No, no -- I meant "Charlie as son of Tilly." Smart is more like a Prometheus, a fellow who stole the fire; Smart is the usurper of the throne for which any child of Tilly would be…
25 Nov 2002, 22:15
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Back on the PEACE channel, I've probably mentioned this a time or two, but my conviction seems to be growing. All the threads about forgery and statues and people being statues (a…
25 Nov 2002, 21:19
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Well I've just reread FLF for the first time. I did like it better than the last time. The screwball comedy reminds me now of old films I've seen since the first read: movies lik…
25 Nov 2002, 06:02
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Maybe it will help things to expand the timeframe a bit. As Roy has mentioned not too long ago, the end of Pas's planned time came 100 years prior to events in TBOTLS (hc II, 235)…
19 Nov 2002, 16:41
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I dunno, Roy, but it seems to me that the same vanity of Typhon would make him more inclined to create a two-headed Pas. (I guess this is one of those "It isn't a bug, it is a fea…
08 Nov 2002, 21:20
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This is a strangely literal take on a metaphorical painting! Unless you really think Typhon was out there driving a bulldozer at the end? <g> Iconically, the painting shows "Pas m…
07 Nov 2002, 21:56
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The OED has nothing; THE NEW YORK TIMES EVERYDAT DICTIONARY OF MISUNDERSTOOD, MISUSED, AND MISPRONOUNCED WORDS has nothing; MRS. BYRNE'S DICTIONARY has "pinacotheca" [note spelling…
07 Nov 2002, 14:39
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To reiterate, I think that the two stories from the green book are magical and in a separate category from the other stories. (In the larger view I think that Weer is incapable of…
03 Nov 2002, 19:50
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Hmm. Yes, I think so. In any event, we agree that Lou Gold forged one! Hmmm, that's interesting. I'm not certain as to Kate's plotting and/or desires: I am only certain that th…
02 Nov 2002, 18:17
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Welcome Kipling! Glad you found the place! =mantis=…
02 Nov 2002, 17:39
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It seems to me that there is a historic sweep to PEACE that reaches its climax in "The President." In ways it reminds me of Coetzee's WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS [1980] in incorpor…
01 Nov 2002, 18:55
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Right, I meant "Lois." (Or are you just giving me a hard time?) <g> Right, the diary is a forgery by Lou Gold. No, not at all: it presupposes that the tryst (that is, the non-ve…
01 Nov 2002, 18:05
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Responding to Crush, hartshorn quoted That's funny, because I initially wrote it as RAMPO two or three times and then corrected it to the Ranpo that Crush gave! The humor goes fu…
31 Oct 2002, 18:04
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"Edogawa Ranpo" was the pen name of a Japanese author (the name itself is a not-really-disguised "Japanification" of "Edgar Allan Poe"). I associate Edogawa Ranpo's work with Japa…
31 Oct 2002, 17:28
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That is not the verbatim of the diary text. If you prefer, it is the image of the "story behind the veiled text" that Weer imagines as Kate reads it, but I think it is too close i…
31 Oct 2002, 14:53
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And here I thought we might have different interpretations of the joke (in light of the Jonas joke)! But wait -- you think they are the same age? Hmmm. I thought we had agreed t…
31 Oct 2002, 01:53
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Fair enough. Well now you're wrong: the gold historically exists and has never been found! (I know, you mean it was never where they were digging.) I will go further and say that…
30 Oct 2002, 22:53
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No, William, the fault is mine and I knew it shortly after I posted the WAY-bee note. I had taken the LC quote as leaning on the BEE-fore and BEE-hind, when in fact for all I know…
30 Oct 2002, 18:01
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Oops, correction! I =am= advocating time travel! That was a slip of the keypad. My textual reference here is the fact that when Bobby arrives at Weer's party he is already prese…
30 Oct 2002, 17:12
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Thank both editions that we still have "Sherry, who is sixteen now"! And all those weird antics with nurse repeatedly coming into the examining room and telling Weer to take his c…
30 Oct 2002, 06:20
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Ahem. Damien Broderick voiced an opinion of many readers when he proposed to Gene Wolfe that Weer found buried gold in that expedition with Lois. Gene Wolfe said no he did not. …
29 Oct 2002, 17:16
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Sherry tells Weer that joke about the immigrant who writes back to his cousin about how on the first day in the new country a person eats free in the best restaurant, sleeps in the…
29 Oct 2002, 01:36
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In my recent re-reading I was struck by the Proustian quality of the sentence structure, and paragraph structure. The sentence structure is very dense and noodly; the paragraphs f…
28 Oct 2002, 23:13
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Thanks to Stone Ox for pointing us toward an online version of PERSIAN LETTERS. The section under discussion does not give, imho, an accurate sense of what that novel is about. I…
28 Oct 2002, 15:41
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Roy and I, on this list, have discussed the big plate of spaghetti that is PEACE. The most tangled noodle of the whole thing is, I believe (well, for the moment at least -- bear w…
28 Oct 2002, 04:33
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Here's a wild thought: what if swinging Ted Singer did the honorable thing and married bad-girl Sherry Gold? There has always been a strange link between the two in the text. Whe…
24 Oct 2002, 23:19
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Oops! Right. Says so right on the page that he was six. And I also didn't mention the "china" hen (really milk glass) that Olivia left to represent herself (as she said) in the …
24 Oct 2002, 19:56
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William Ansley's memory of PEACE is very sharp! This is right. The only additions I would make are: "wabe" is part of the strange oath that slips out of an orange guy in an ungua…
24 Oct 2002, 18:09
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Here are some notes from my recent rereading. Hardcover this time. 1) branding as a finalization "brand new" -- steps of a process, near end of sequence but prior to actual use. …
24 Oct 2002, 16:14
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Long time no see, Wombat! You wrote a good post and I could follow all of it except for this one part: With this line you seem to be saying that there is a form of Gnosticism tha…
23 Oct 2002, 21:13
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Yep, that's the book switch as I see it. The book exterior looks exactly like the book that Della bought, and it is in the same squished box that she wrapped it in. Since I don't…
23 Oct 2002, 13:56
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Very nice! Have we ever seen that before? I don't think so. Gotten close, with "the memory mansion is all inside the hollow skull" stuff, via the Necronomicon passage. It leads…
22 Oct 2002, 18:46
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Well, yes, that is a possible funny answer to it . . . and it does put an extra twist . . . and it is a nice tie to the joke in PEACE . . . But hang on a second! The context of t…
22 Oct 2002, 16:25
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My current position on the embedded stories has shifted dramatically from my previous position. The green book stories are blueprints for Weer's life, and this because the book is…
22 Oct 2002, 15:30
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Santa Claus is something of a chimerical creature -- part saint (Saint Nicholas), part elf, part burglar <g>. While he does not appear as himself in "A Christmas Carol" as one of …
22 Oct 2002, 15:09
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Well they have always seemed thematically related, but I don't recall anyone trying to make a stronger case. Interesting thought, to arrange all the tales of America declining and…
22 Oct 2002, 01:11
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In the AD 2274 timeframe, all the Americans have died out. Throughout PEACE there is a sense of "decline and fall," like that of the Roman Empire, with Weer being something like a…
22 Oct 2002, 00:00
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