# Yes to everything! *The Urth list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 03 Sep 1999* > 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. --- ### Dan Parmenter *03 Sep 1999, 11:53* > From: "Jim Henley" > I must reluctantly agree with you here, which is too bad, because I really > want it to be Argentina and Buenos Aires. If only the mountains and the sea > were reversed! I'll bet it's Typhon's fault... I don't see why the Commonwealth can't "be" Buenos Aires *and* Constantinople *and* New York City for that matter. Wolfe isn't about search-and-replace. It seems to me that whatever Wolfe found fascinating, he worked in. It's was once observed in regard to "The Circus of Dr. Lao" by Charles Finney that it's a mistake for an author to try to sum up a lifetime's observations and experience in one novel, which in many ways "Lao" seems to do quite successfully without ever being a mere autobiography. I would suggest that BOTNS also succeeds in this regard. Like Finney, Wolfe does a certain amount of combining and abstracting and in the end nothing is as it seems but everything is exactly what it's supposed to be. D ---