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Some responses to vizcacha's fine second reading of RTTW. <2) It's quite obvious to me that RttW, and to a lesser extent TBotSS as a whole, is a long suicide note. Clearly Silk wa…
12 Feb 2001, 01:58
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Shortly after Pig, Hound, and Horn reach New Viron, Pig confesses to a terrible crime: in one of his looting sprees, he's killed an augur. This, he professes, took place before he …
10 Feb 2001, 12:46
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Much of how I view the resolution of SHORT SUN is bound up in how I interpret the character of Pig, so I'm going to devote a number of posts to him. When Hound registers Pig at Er…
10 Feb 2001, 12:46
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Rostrum having weighed the evidence and decided: <"hush.og"? Looks like a website for librarians. I suppose that's supposed to say "hush og"? And I guess you mean that the orig…
04 Dec 2000, 10:48
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After trying for the past four years to figure out the etymology of hus, but failing, I decided to go to the man himself for help, and here is what he told me: "Hus is a little em…
02 Dec 2000, 12:54
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Earlier today mantis having speculated: <1) Re the artificial-seeming age/decay of the buildings on Ste. Croix. (Have we already talked about how) This is another strong pointer t…
29 Nov 2000, 17:31
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For anyone who hasn't read Wolfe's EMPIRES OF FOLIAGE AND FLOWERS yet, you can get it real cheap at www.salebooks.com (Daedalus Books), which is offering the hardcover edition of B…
15 Nov 2000, 13:37
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Blattid having wondered: I'm one of the people who believe this and say so both on my website and in my 5H review in Ultan's Library. I have three reasons for so doing. 1) The l…
14 Nov 2000, 12:47
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Dan'l Blattid having further amended his original post thusly: <In other words: There _is_ an Earthborn anthropologist; that is beyond any reasonable doubt. What I am suggesting …
11 Nov 2000, 01:12
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Blattid having written: <Also, is there any reason to believe that there was ever a real John V. Marsch? I mean, by that name -- there clearly was a homeworld anthropologist. I a…
10 Nov 2000, 01:30
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mantis having written: <Oh good: now we can see that interviews, while providing some data points, are not necessarily the be-all and end-all. I mean, not to complain or anything…
06 Nov 2000, 13:45
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I've been enjoying immensely the recent series of posts on PEACE--quite possibly my all-time favorite list discussion--so please accept my thanks and congratulations to everyone wh…
05 Nov 2000, 17:24
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Wondering what you have to look forward to once the Short Sun trilogy concludes? Here's the early word on Wolfe's current project, tentatively entitled THE WIZARD KNIGHT, straight…
17 Oct 2000, 13:18
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While Horn is still in Gaon as Rajan, a fortune-teller comes and makes a number of predictions about what is yet to transpire in his life. Writes Horn: "It was the usual mix of fla…
11 Sep 2000, 18:29
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Endymion having written: <p.63 "What did you want with your brother?" the man of the Vanished People asked him. And he said that he had hoped to bury the corpse and pray for the …
10 Sep 2000, 11:58
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For a long time now I have been trying to figure out Seawrack's real name. That Seawrack isn't her real name is revealed to us very early on in BLUE, when Horn first confides, "th…
08 Sep 2000, 12:51
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First things first, a reader alert: our own mantis reviews IN GREEN'S JUNGLES in the latest issue of THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF SCIENCE FICTION (Sept., #145). As befits the only man I …
05 Sep 2000, 23:39
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Here are a few more plot-points to my Mother-as-Scylla hypothesis. In addition to the previous examples I cited where Horn directly or indirectly compared the two, let me note the…
05 Sep 2000, 12:21
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Still mulling over the idea that the inhumi might be able to breed on Blue, my latest thoughts being triggered by the following: <"Would it be effective for us to dig up one of th…
04 Sep 2000, 12:56
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Winged Falcon writing: <On the subject of Oreb and the Night Chough, I'm with Alga all the way. Clearly Scylla is speaking through Oreb as Mr. Borski says, but these are just as c…
01 Sep 2000, 13:01
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Mnemonic having written: <Judging by the danger and said low success rate, I think that inhumu must be able to obtain enough blood and be able to breed on both planets.> I'm sort…
01 Sep 2000, 12:09
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Mnemonic having written: <I don't think it's likely that the inhumu go back and forth as often as people have previously speculated. In both books I believe, Horn says that even …
01 Sep 2000, 11:41
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alga: Here's another plot-point perhaps for your changeling theory. From p.42 of OBW: "Have I said how closely Sinew resembled me? Perhaps not? There was something devilish about…
31 Aug 2000, 01:36
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This will probably put me at odds with the usual bunch, but I'd like now to suggest that the entire notion about how the inhumi are able to fly back and forth between Green and Blu…
29 Aug 2000, 14:44
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alga having written: <In the next paragraph he says "You feared that jungle, I know; so did I at times." I think the "you" is Sinew. But what on earth is "our" as in blood? Yours …
28 Aug 2000, 12:09
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alga and William Ansley writing respectively: Essentially, the three of us are in agreement here, all thinking the eight-legged creature is Babbie. I just believe Babbie is more t…
25 Aug 2000, 01:31
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Sbearo having written: <I see what you mean about Bricco, but Brother and Sister live on an entirely different continent to Fava. She is finding children (different ones each time…
24 Aug 2000, 11:46
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Falcon having written: <On to Oreb. I don't find the evidence presented thus far at all convincing. Just because Oreb sees Scylla in the lake and another person sees Scylla walk…
24 Aug 2000, 01:15
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Ian Smith having previously written: < "I found him in the forest, sitting in the dark under the trees. I could not see him, it was too dark to see anything. But I knelt beside hi…
23 Aug 2000, 14:35
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Nick Gevers having wondered: Couple of thoughts here. When Horn first meets up with the Neighbors on Shadelow, he writes: "There were more shadowy figures seated around [the fire…
22 Aug 2000, 13:34
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Fernando Gouvea having previously written: <Clearly the events at the very end of OBW are very important. Who are the Brother and Sister?> As I briefly mentioned in a previous po…
18 Aug 2000, 23:08
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Kevin Maroney having written: <Someone here--Robert Borski, I think--pegged the scene towards the end of _Green_ as taking place during the swimming scene in chapter 1 of _Shadow …
18 Aug 2000, 01:34
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I've always wondered why Typhon targeted the Blue-Green system as the Whorl's ultimate destination. (This assumes the ship did not end up there by accident or miscalculation.) Spe…
11 Aug 2000, 21:08
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Ian Smith having written: <I agree that if it the Mother was just plain Long-Sun Scylla, she'd probably announce it loudly and do unpleasant things to any humans she encountered, …
04 Aug 2000, 13:08
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Safely on the ground again, but backpedaling from an earlier position, I'd like to now toss out the following notion: is it possible that the entity Horn and Seawrack call the Moth…
01 Aug 2000, 14:36
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I've been wanting to write an in-depth analysis of "The Haunted Boardinghouse" for some time. Unfortunately, it does not now look like I will have the temporal wherewithal to do th…
23 Jun 2000, 22:12
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My first "Pepper Mill" post was dashed off between lunchtime sandwiches and was influenced somewhat by potent memories of Todd Solandz' "Welcome to the Dollhouse," which I'd watche…
03 Feb 2000, 11:45
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My spin on "The Man in the Pepper Mill" is, of course, unorthodox. I believe it's more about the war between the sexes than anything spiritual. Consider both the pepper mill and …
02 Feb 2000, 15:18
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More kibble for Nutria to munch away on: <Wow, Borski. You make an interesting case. I guess it just does not make sense to me, without something a lot more explicit. From what I …
29 Jan 2000, 15:52
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My two centavos worth on "The Ziggurat" controversy, most of which plays off of Nutria's rather interesting interpretation. I think that for all intents and purposes that Tamar _i…
28 Jan 2000, 16:33
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Given that "Babbie" does mean "baby" (OED), and that he can "talk," could this be punster Wolfe's tip of the hat to the wonderful "Babe" movie of several years ago, with its titula…
09 Nov 1999, 15:18
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<And someone (I forget who) on here has pointed out that Cyby is described as roughly what Wolfe might have looked at when he wrote BOTNS, so we have Wolfe as the humble apprentice…
05 Nov 1999, 17:16
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'Wijze,' in Dutch, means 'tune,' 'melody,' 'manner,' or perhaps most significantly, 'mood' (meaning here the grammatical sense, not the emotional--how, that is, a clause containing…
13 Oct 1999, 01:04
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How to kill an inhumu/a? Let us count the ways. According to Wijzer, drowning doesn't work. Burning them, however, does--this, according to Horn, is the practice in New Viron (an…
02 Oct 1999, 03:32
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Mr. Greene: Nice bit of research and extrapolation. Congratulations. Here are my counter-arguments: I think the key work here is "finally." The alcalde never mentions any giantis…
02 Oct 1999, 01:38
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Alex Groce having written: This system of narrative break--the triangle of asterisks--is first used in THE FIFTH HEAD OF CERBERUS. Wolfe has denied that Blue and Green are Sainte…
29 Sep 1999, 02:09
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Shortly after Severian arrives in Saltus, he's taken to the house of Barnoch the bandit, the door and single window of which have been sealed with rough masonry. According to the a…
15 Jul 1999, 14:18
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mantis: While I understand how you may have arrived at this conclusion, I think it raises more questions than it answers (as opposed to my own navigator = JFK theory). And while a…
09 Jun 1999, 02:48
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<Now then, if we are back in the antechamber, again talking about Jonas, the central mystery seems to me to be: what is so upsetting to Jonas? It seems to be something(s) that the…
28 May 1999, 20:35
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mantis having discursed on my fan fictionialized version of Jonas: <Well, this reading moves very far away from or around the evidence (however one wants to interpret said evidenc…
28 May 1999, 01:09
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