{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/2099",
    "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": 2099,
    "subject": "Ziggurat \"Maximum Delusion mode\"",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "2000-01-28T14:19:50+00:00",
    "last": "2000-01-28T14:19:50+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0028-0748@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Michael Andre-Driussi",
        "address": "mantis at sirius.com"
      },
      "date": "2000-01-28T14:19:50+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) Ziggurat \"Maximum Delusion mode\"",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Well!\n\nI don't sense much difference between the Kessel (was it?) reading and the\nSwanwick reading I was talking about: both use \"Maximum Delusion\" mode.\nThat is, all the skiffy stuff is just delusion on the part of Emory.\nZiggurat, laser weapon, all that stuff is just not real.\n\nIIRC, the Swanwick model was saying that Emory killed the coyote, not by\nsome passive way, but by Emory pulling the trigger of the rifle that put\nthe lead bullet into the coyote and made him dead.\n\nLikewise, the murder of the son.  Quite active.  \"While Emory was\n=sleeping=,\" indeed.\n\nAs for \"why don't we see it?\"  Well, look, I don't want to argue too\nstrenuously for a theory that isn't mine, but the same questions were once\napplied to NULL-A: \"When does hero Gilbert urinate or defecate?  Throughout\nthe whole novel we never see it happen.\"  To which van Vogt replied:\n\"Between chapters.\" <g> I think it is strongly in the suit of Maximum\nDelusion to suppose that Emory is largely unaware of what he is doing: part\nof the nature of the horror; you know, like how when Oedipus killed that\nold guy at the crossroads.  Furthermore, I think one of the original hooks\nfor Maximum Delusion was Emory's muted response to finding his dead son:\nthere seemed to be something more happening here, something odd, something\nin a blindspot, something other than \"men have no feelings, even for their\nown children.\"\n\nI'm not sure where this \"daughters from the future\" angle crept in--in \"Max\nDel\" mode it is, of course, delusion: the \"alien female from the ziggurat\"\nis really and actually the very same girl from Emory's shattered family.\n\nIt ain't my theory.  I'd read the story and liked it as a cold horror\nstory.  I hadn't formed much of an opinion other than that.  I think the\nMaximum Delusion mode makes the story much closer to Wolfe's \"Redbeard\"\nthan, say, \"Try and Kill It\" (which TZ has certain obvious similarities\nto).  It seems like a \"male Medea\" kind of thing.\n\nRe: the strategy of \"hunt the wolf,\" please, let us make a distinction\nbetween the animal and a specific man.  Neil Gaiman saw the alzabo as a\nwolf, and further developed the concept: the alzabo is a \"gene\" wolf.  I\nwon't belabor the difference.\n\nIdentifying Emory as a Wolfe-stand-in (because he is an old white guy\nengineer, and because he says Uncle Wolfey sorts of things) is probably the\nfirst stage of the process for most of the readers who were/are outraged\nabout the story.  Crafty Gene seems to slap certain readers in the face\nwith this particular red herring, a herring that looks like a John Norman\ninterview (where JN spouts all sorts of chauvinistic \"Gor\" things as being\ntrue on Earth) folded into a \"barely disguised fiction\"; here is the\nsmoking gun, for readers primed or looking for such readings.  And then the\nherring, focus of hypnotic attention, is tossed into the hedge of\nChase-Your-Tail, while the story itself dodges away.\n\nThus, the wife is evil for having done all this bad stuff (in a passive\nway--that is, she sets things into motion, like Pandora or the Evil Queen);\nand brave, heartful engineer (actively) tries hard to save all the pieces,\nmaking a few (passive) mistakes; all as mysterious external forces\n(actively) pick them off one by one.\n\nAnd this is, as a matter of fact, the way that it was when Swanwick\npresented by stages the thing I'm calling \"Maximum Delusion\": one or three\nmale persons were going on about the ugly portrayal of adult womyn in \"The\nZiggurat,\" buttressed with examples from \"The Cat\" and even, what\nsynchronicity! \"The Haunted Boardinghouse.\"  Round and round and round they\nwent!  Then along came Swanwick and here was something different to think\nabout, a reading that somehow managed to derail the train before the tigers\nturned into butter.\n\n=mantis="
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}