{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/1084",
    "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it.  Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.",
    "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'"
  },
  "archive": "urth",
  "thread": {
    "id": 1084,
    "subject": "Backwardsness",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "1998-09-02T20:34:13+00:00",
    "last": "1998-09-02T20:34:13+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0018-0090@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Robert Borski",
        "address": "rborski at coredcs.com"
      },
      "date": "1998-09-02T20:34:13+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) Backwardsness",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "mantis having written earlier:\n\n\"I understand that Merlin is said to be living backwards in time.  And this\ndevice has since been used by writers. So I don't know . . . it is\ncertainly possible, but I think it usually manifests in certain\nquirky elements--people knowing their future/past but not the past/future\nwhich shaped them (I'm thinking maybe of THE ARROW OF TIME here, which I\nonly read of in reviews, but the hero has these mysterious scars and as he\ngets younger he ends up in a concentration camp where the scars are\ninflicted/removed), etc.\"\n\nActually, I think you mean TIME'S ARROW by Martin Amis. And it's a powerful\nbook, well worth seeking out, not only for its time-lived-backwards\nexecution (Tod Friendly is \"born\" at the end of his life and \"dies\" when he\nis born), but also the concentration camp tie-in, which still blows me\naway. (You think the Holocaust is horrible enough already, wait'll you\nexperience it in reverse.)\n\nComic-book-writer Alan Moore's \"The Reversible Man\" explores similar\nterrain.\n\nAs for Gene Wolfe, \"In Looking Glass Castle\" is a shorter work of his where\na character lives life backwards and thus remembers the future--clearly\nmodeled here on Lewis Carroll's White Queen, who does the same. In this\ncase, however, it's Daisy McKane, who, although she's naturally confused,\nremembers her own drowning.\n\nI also believe there is some support for the notion that the Merlin\ncharacters in CASTLEVIEW--Mercedes and her mother--may be experiencing life\nbackwards.\n\nRobert Borski"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}