Pandora, By Holly Hollander, by Gene Wolfe, By Kurt Vonnegut The Urth list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 17 Dec 1999 https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/2040 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. ============================================================================== Paul C Duggan — 17 Dec 1999, 08:56 > A fair but not trivial question. I'm assuming we're considering this _as > if_ the fictional Kilgore Trout were real - we're not considering the > question of what happens if Vonnegut writes a story reproducing the entire > text of TBOTNS by Trout, or even Philip Jose Farmer writing TBOTNS while > pretending to be KT. (One knew that _someone_ was pretending to be KT.) Well, when Vonnegut writes "We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges." it's certainly much different than Wolfe's "We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges." You can clearly see the difference. Alot of other identical texts are pretty different too. Do you think Vonnegut did that intentionally? Vonnegut's Severian lies alot less than Wolfe's does too. :-) Paul ------------------------------------------------------------------------------