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At 18:15 2001-05-04, Blattid wrote:
My first reaction to "Copperhead" was roughly equivalent to my first reaction to several other Lupine shorts, notably the ever-present "Suzanne Delage": "Huh?"
I'm not ashamed to say that I Don't Get It, and (unusual for me with Wolfe) I'm not at all convinced that "it"'s there to get. there's bunch of stuff at the beginning that isn't followed up at all; I have no idea why the woman with the strange voice from another dimension behaves as she does; and the ending vaguely-out-of-Genesis simply doesn't follow from the story in any way I can perceive.
The Changer swaps things with cognates, i.e. rough equivalents. The thing moving under the leaves is surely a Copperhead snake, which has been swapped with a Serpent from another universe. That also accounts for the identity of the man swapped for the president - supreme leader, big boss - at the end, and of course he's annoyed.
Things that confused me:
1. Are Boone and General Martens the same person?
2. Who gets murdered and why?
3. The dialect gets impenetrable at the worst possible moment
- what do "groose" and "grawnt" mean?
Spectacled Bear.
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I suspect
the whole thing of being to some extent a venting of spleen at
Wm Jefferson Clinton, who doubtless has it coming, but would probably not have a clue that spleen had been vented at him.
--Dan'l
*This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun.