Jesuits/Devils

In a message dated 6/5/99 4:17:42 AM, Damen Broderick writes: << I'd blame the big-eyed greys, myself. (Has anyone tried exorcising them?)>> Damen has inadvertently stumbled into my realm of expertise. The Greys were in fact exorcised in 1979 in a private ceremony at the Dallas Hilton. They are Whites now. And don't think, Sir, that simply dropping a vowel or two from your name can hide your True Identity. Yours in Christ, Patrick O'Leary

Don't you mean `they're still Greys, because there's nothing wrong in being grey, of course, but they have a much more fulfilled inner life now they have been purged of their anachronistic, stereotyped attitudes to terrestrial species?'

But isn't it cultist to have negative attitudes towards someone just because their father may (or, of course, may not) be an inappropriate role model? While I'm posting, is it OK if I mention something Wolfe-related? (Now I have to try and get my tongue out of my cheek, but it's lodged there so firmly...) I read `The Sparrow' recently, and a couple of comparisons with Wolfe struck me. The first is more or less the one that has been discussed --- Wolfe's religious outlook is so much more subtle; you're not being beaten with a stick marked `Theology' every few pages. The second was on the subject of aliens and alien worlds. I was disappointed in `The Sparrow' to find that the world didn't strike me as properly alien at all. It's the sort of place which a hundred years would have turned up along an uncharted tributary of the Amazon, rather than in another star system (and this is probably grossly unfair, but I have this vague feeling it could even have worked better that way). Then it occurred to me --- Wolfe's alien's somehow aren't that alien either. But in his case it seems to me deliberate. In his blurring the boundary of fantasy and science fiction, his aliens are somewhat like his undines etc.: slightly altered human beings for a universe which is somehow slightly changed from ours. That goes in `Cerberus' too --- and there perhaps there are hints that he doesn't think his aliens are so alien either. It even goes for inhumi, which disguise themselves as human --- the differences are more the sort you'd expect in a work of horror rather than SF. Perhaps that's another clue. There's a scene where Severian is confronted by the hierodules, and they show him that they're wearing horrific masks under their benign ones, apparently just to play on human fears about aliens (hope I've remembered that right). Wolfe's aliens are a personification both of our search for higher meanings, and our fears of finding our own darker selves at the end of the search --- which brings us back neatly to the subject line. (Trite, or what. Sorry.) corncrake