Subject: (urth) Lovely Green Ste. Anne

From: akt <akt at attglobal.net>
Date: Tue, 05 Dec 2000 20:48:42 +0000

Tony, I find this eerie. When I skimmed your post in the digest I did
not notice your subject line. I thought you were proposing 5HC as a
prototype of the Short Sun situation, and I was all prepared to come
back at you with an argument involving how certain patterns and subjects
almost always stay on a writer's mind and constantly show up in the work
without there necessarily being a connection (there are exceptions, but
not so many). But you weren't. And now I have to do that switchover
debate thing and make the point myself! And I don't even get to refute
it. Oy!

-alga

> From: "Tony Ellis" <tony.ellis at futurenet.co.uk>
> Subject: 5HC: a timeline with no dates

> Every time I re-read ‘A story’ in 5HC, I find myself piecing things
> together again from scratch and from the few notes I’ve pencilled in
the
> margin of my worn paperback. I made this little timeline to give
myself
> a solid base to work from, and I thought I might as well inflict it on
> the rest of you, too. It has no dates, but lots of quotes to show that
> I’m not just making all this stuff up.
>
> 1. “`We were mostly long, and lived in holes between the roots of
> trees.’” Millions of years ago, a native species existed on St. Anne.
It
> was telepathic, but by our standards mindless. It may have had the
power
> to change its shape: “’When we came some of you looked like every kind
> of beast…’”
> 2. A human spacecraft from a prehistoric civilisation on Earth
splashes
> down on St. Anne: “’It is possible that our home was named Atlantis,
or
> Mu…’”
> 3. “’The first heard the songs of the second and sent them out again –
> greater, greater, greater than before.’” The native species
> telepathically receives and amplifies the thoughts of the newcomers.
> This has two effects:
> a) the humans feel something they have never known before, perhaps the
> aboriginal ‘dreaming’ Sandwalker and his people share, and are seduced
> by it: “’We had no songs when we came here – that was one of the
reasons
> we stayed…’”
> b) awakening to sentience, the native species is enthralled by the
> newcomers: “’We [the humans] so impressed your kind that you became
like
> us…’” If they are shape changers, they begin to actually look like
men.
> 4. Over time, the human arrivals lose all trace of civilisation, all
> memory of earth. The ability to use tools atrophies. They become the
> Hill People, and the Marsh Men.
> 5. The native species becomes the Shadow Children: "mock men". Stoned
> out of their tiny telepathic minds on a narcotic plant that makes them
> feel like God, they see themselves as the mighty star-crossing humans,
> and Sandwalker’s people as the “native animals”. Their communal
> telepathy makes this self-perpetuating.
> 6. On earth, the 20th century comes and goes.
> 7. The Shadow Children project a telepathic shield, hiding St. Anne
and
> its sister world from detection by passing spacecraft.
> 8. Sandwalker’s story takes place. The Shadow Children remove their
> shield.
> 9. A human spacecraft from a future civilisation on Earth splashes
down
> on St. Anne.

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