{ "export": { "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/2082", "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": 2082, "subject": "Ziggurat spoilers, or \"The good company you keep\"", "messages": 2, "voices": 2, "first": "2000-01-21T13:25:19+00:00", "last": "2000-01-21T17:07:04+00:00" }, "messages": [ { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "Michael Andre-Driussi", "address": "mantis at sirius.com" }, "date": "2000-01-21T13:25:19+00:00", "subject": "(urth) Ziggurat spoilers, or \"The good company you keep\"", "in_reply_to": null, "reply_link": null, "blocks": [ { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "IIRC, it was none other than luminary Michael Swanwick, whose reading of\n\"The Ziggurat\" included a significant nod to the sense of incest at the end\n. . .\n\n\n\n\n\nSPOILERS TO FOLLOW\n\n\n\n\n\n\nI have no hardcopy of the online discussion, so if anybody wants to follow\nup on this you will have to talk to Swanwick by correspondence or at a\nconvention.\n\nPoint one: Where does Gene Wolfe's sympathy lie in the story? Swanwick\nsays to use the standard \"find the wolf\" trick. The wolf in this story is\nthe coyote. Who killed the coyote? Emory did.\n\nPoint b: Who killed the son? Emory did.\n\nQuestion Marquess: Why does the final scene seem like incest? Because it\nis incest--the \"alien\" is one of his daughters. The allegations of incest\nfor the divorce were probably a lie, but as is so often the case in Wolfe\nfiction, the lie has a terrible way of coming true in the end.\n\nAll together, iirc, this paints a feral picture of Emory: destroying his\nbetter self the coyote, killing the rival his son, and marrying his own\ndaughter to \"start over, doing it right this time.\" Not unlike Baldanders,\nin cutting himself off from the outside world (and/or God) in order to\npersue megalomania; or the pirate scientist of 5HC; but in detail more like\nseveral heroic Greek horrors all at once.\n\nGranted, some may have a knee-jerk rejection of this reading on the grounds\nthat it applies the (flawed) \"mass murderer\" reading of PEACE to a\ndifferent Wolfe story. But before you reject it too quickly, think again\non Swanwick, who is wise among Wolfe fans. (I really wish he would write\nsome essays on Wolfe.)\n\n=mantis=" } ] }, { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "Alex David Groce", "address": "alex_groce at gs246.sp.cs.cmu.edu" }, "date": "2000-01-21T17:07:04+00:00", "subject": "Re: (urth) Ziggurat spoilers, or \"The good company you keep\"", "in_reply_to": "", "reply_link": "subject", "blocks": [ { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "Hmmm... Yeah, I caught the Tamar reference--I hadn't thought of the\ndaughter-of-the-future possibility--but this is a clone of a step-daughter if\nso, which IMO makes Emory considerably less responsible for incest than, say,\nSeverian. I simply don't think the story presents things so as to suggest\nthat the incest (with the daughters) is real.\n\nYes, Emory kills the coyote--but acknowledges his own guilt, if you look\nclosely. Certainly he's a more ambiguously bad figure than\nBaldanders (not that Wolfe doesn't give even Baldanders his devil's due).\n\nIt seems to me that Emory IS quite Weer-ish: they share a kind of curiosity\nthat can lead them into error/disaster, yet also seems to serve as a redeeming\nelement (consider a Weer who DIDN'T hunt for the treasure with Lois, or an\nEmory who said \"hell, I'm not going back to my cabin with those crazies, let's\nfind a motel, son\"). Both have a kind of wisdom that they often seem unable\nto apply to themselves (note Weer's comment re: testifying about the abuse\nto the \"good twin\"--his reference here to God makes me have trouble seeing\nEmory as a cut-off-from-creation figure like Baldanders). Emory's certainly\nflawed, and his curiosity gets his son murdered, but he also seems to me to\nhave a considerable amount of author sympathy (in this sense I disagree with\nGardner Dozois' comments in the intro to whichever Year's Best SF he didn't\nprint \"The Ziggurat\" in as well as with Swanwick--Wolfe hardly ever portrays\na protagonist without massive, potentially deadly, flaws--but Emory has as\nmuch underlying author sympathy with him as, say, Number 5 or Weer, I think).\nIn fact, I think one thing this story does is set up a situation where it\nseems to be a possibility of a \"lone man defending his cabin against invaders\"\nand then turns it inside-out--neither the man nor the invaders are purely\nevil or wrong--both are trapped by misunderstanding and human nature--but the\nend indicates that even in these cirumstances, after blood and pain, there may\nbe a possibility for something else, even if that's ambiguous, too.\n\n\n\"And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.\" John 8:32" }, { "kind": "sig", "depth": 0, "text": "Alex David Groce (agroce+ at cs.cmu.edu)\nPh.D. Student, Carnegie Mellon University - Computer Science Department\n8112 Wean Hall (412)-268-3066\nhttp://www.cs.cmu.edu/~agroce" } ] } ] }