Subject: (urth) Tony's Ellis Island

From: Michael Andre-Driussi <mantis at siriusfiction.com>
Date: Wed, 24 Apr 2002 13:29:17 +0000

Tony Ellis wrote:
>Remarkable similarity of form to, and ability to interbreed with, human
>beings, you mean? The explanation is that abos -are- human beings. They are
>the descendants of prehistoric colonists from Earth. Wolfe goes out of his
>way to prime us with this idea in all three novellas in 5HC, and that's good
>enough for me.

When you write "prehistoric," do you mean "from Gondwonaland"?  If so, the
adjective form is "Gondwonan"; this might help telegraph your position with
greater precision.  If you don't mean "Gondwonan," then I'm not at all sure
what you are referring to.

=mantis=

SIRIUS FICTION
booklets on Gene Wolfe, John Crowley
51 Snake's-hands left until OP!
http://www.siriusfiction.com/

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From: Tony Ellis <littlesense at necronomicon.co.uk>
Date: Wed, 24 Apr 2002 17:25:49 +0000

>what you are referring to.

I mean "from the period of humanity's development predating recorded
history." 5000BC or older, I suppose. Not "predating recent Annese colonial
history" if that's what you thought.

Gondwanaland is never mentioned in isolation in the novellas, but always in
the same breath as Atlantis, Africa, Mu, and other places quite separate in
terms of geography and the time at which they existed or are supposed to
have existed. Since it is never established which, if any, of these is the
home the ancient colonists came from, picking the one with the most
scientific name isn't really being any more precise.

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From: Michael Andre-Driussi <mantis at siriusfiction.com>
Date: Wed, 24 Apr 2002 18:54:56 +0000

>scientific name isn't really being any more precise.

Well no, "scientific name" isn't what I'm looking at--it is the "date
stamp" that each one carries.

Granted, the list which you allude to is a mixed bag of real and legendary
places.  But it seems to me that each, even the legendary ones, has a date
associated with it.

Basically I wonder how your reading has accomodated Gondwanaland.  There
must be a hundred ways, or at least a few dozen.  Rather than I list a few,
I would rather you just tell me.

Your message above suggests you are looking at/for a single wave of
colonization?  Another interesting datapoint in reconstructing the mosaic
of your personal reading.

=mantis=

Sirius Fiction
booklets on Gene Wolfe, John Crowley
PEACE: a timeline WITH dates! Come see!
http://www.siriusfiction.com/

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From: Tony Ellis <littlesense at necronomicon.co.uk>
Date: Thu, 25 Apr 2002 13:29:49 +0000

>I would rather you just tell me.

My reading is that at some era predating all known civilisations on Earth, a
(now long-dead) civilisation arose on Earth that developed space travel,
colonised St Anne, and became the 'abos'. Gondwanaland is one place, among
others, where that civilisation may have arisen.

And that's it. I don't think we're given enough information to draw any
further conclusions, so I don't try. I don't think we're meant to read
anything into the specific names given or into any dates that can be
attached to them, they're just another way of saying "On Earth, a very long
time ago."

>colonization?

A single (pre 5000BC) wave is all that is needed to get a human race on St
Anne that can one day interbreed with French colonists, so yes. Except.

Except that the Old Wise One does say that "it may be that all are one
 stock" - in other words, as I understand it, that the Shadow Children may
be humans too. This would require an even earlier wave of colonisation from
Earth, or perhaps prion's theory that St Anne is where humanity originated.
The trouble is, making the Shadow Children human contradicts the picture
painstaklingly painted throughout the rest of the story of a non-sentient,
indigenous, telepathic life-form that is awakened to sentience by man's
arrival. "'We had no names before men came out of the sky,' the Old Wise One
said dreamily. 'We were mostly long, and lived in holes between the roots of
trees.'"

Never able to reconcile "it may be that all are one stock" with the rest of
the story, I've reluctantly assumed that this is just idle speculation on
the Old Wise One's part. But I keep trying.

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From: Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <ddanehy at siebel.com>
Date: Thu, 25 Apr 2002 15:17:13 +0000

Tony Ellis wrote:

> My reading is that at some era predating all known civilisations on
> Earth, a (now long-dead) civilisation arose on Earth that developed
> space travel, colonised St Anne, and became the 'abos'. Gondwanaland
> is one place, among others, where that civilisation may have arisen.

H'mmmm. While interesting, this ignores two things.

First, that _all_ the names in the list are of mythical or fictional
places. (Yes, I know: Gondwanaland is a geological hypothesis. And I
say, and believe Wolfe would say, that this is just another kind of
mythical or fictional place.)

Second, that all the names in question were coined in the last three
thousand years or so.

Okay, you can fudge the latter by supposing that the OWO doesn't 
actually say "Atlantis" but the real Atlantean name for Atlantis -- 
or whatever ... though this doesn't help with (for example) 
"Poictesme," which was the invention of a specific human being 
(James Branch Cabell) in the early Twentieth Century and not a
"myth" in the sense of, say, Atlantis at all.

One could, of course, postulate that the Shadow Children, or
perhaps the abos, came from _all_ these places -- that there 
were repeated waves of migration, running from the time of
Gondwanaland right up to medieval France (which is the locus
of Poictesme); somehow this just doesn't seem right. 

This is an example of my "Why does VRT tell this story?" question. 
Frankly, there's no way I can believe that, if it's a true story, 
the OWW actually used those names. VRT uses names that mean something 
to _him_. So (first) why does he use those particular names, why does 
he suggest that the original home of the abos (or perhaps the Shadow 
children) is _mythical_? And (second) how much else in "A Story" is 
such VRT-added detail?  Alternatively: how much of "A Story" is 
fictional?" I believe I have established right here that _some_ is; 
there is thus a greater-than-zero lower limit. Is there an upper 
limit short of "he made the whole thing up?" What, if anything, in
"A Story" can we consider verified or verifiable, within the context
of the whole 5HC?

Tony, I'm sorry, I don't think we can reasonably assume that it's
all basically true. Not just in niggling little details like that;
it just doesn't fit Wolfe's general pattern for "A Story" to be 
fully true -- or fully false. Wolfe's concern with the frame of
narration isn't just a personal quirk; it's fundamental to the way
Wolfe approaches narrative. Every story is told _by_ someone _for_
some reason. Example: Severian (at least in tBotNS) is writing his 
official Autarchial memoir; we must assume, even though he is so
often self-critical, that he will tend to justify himself. Latro is
not writing for a future audience, but to create for himself a kind
of substitute for the continuity from day to day he has lost, and 
will write what he thinks he needs to remember, not what makes a
connected narrative. Horn writes (tBotLS) to persuade everyone that 
Silk is the Good Man, and so his accounts of Silk's goodness has to 
be taken with a small grain of salt. Etc., etc., etc.

This flies flagrantly in the face of the usual SF convention of a
neutral narrator. Even first-person narrators in SF are usually 
presumed to relate events more or less as they actually saw them.
Wolfe is saying, in effect, "Nobody ever does that," and his fictions
give us example after example of who give us what they need us to
hear instead of what we, perhaps, think we need to hear; but we,
if not cautious, think we've heard what we need to hear.

This may seem a belaboring of the point that "Gene Wolfe uses
unreliable narrators," but it isn't. It's saying, rather, that
Wolfe's narrators _can_ be relied upon, but not for a straightforward
factual account; and it places directly in your court, or the court 
of anyone who wishes to say (as you did on Tuesday)that "all of 'A 
Story' should be taken literally," the question of _why_ we should
consider VRT in this account any more literal than any other Wolfe
narrator?

Some thoughts on the telling, if not its reasons: I think it 
reasonable to suppose (as you suggest) that VRT is retelling some
"lore and stories passed onto him by his Annese mother." But why?
Even if we accept your idea that he's telling them to please himself,
what about such a story would most please him? We don't even actually
know whether he wrote it in his cell -- it is equally plausible to 
suppose that this was part of the anthropological work he was doing
for the University. (Clearly the University places _some_ value on 
him, or his work; we learn near the end of part 3 that someone at the 
University is agitating for his release.) Could "A Story" in fact be
his major publication prior to his arrest? And, if so, was gaining
position at the University -- recall his failure at the University on
Ste-Anne -- (one of) his motivation(s) in writing it?

Dismissing it as a story told to please himself and scratch an
anthropological itch, while simultaneously assuming that it's a
literally true story, is just, well, too simple. In my opinion.

--Dan'l

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From: Michael Andre-Driussi <mantis at siriusfiction.com>
Date: Thu, 25 Apr 2002 16:34:24 +0000

>attached to them, they're just another way of saying "On Earth, a very long

Okay, so basically ala Howard's Hyperboria and/or the world of Moorcock's
Elric. That is, homo sapiens sapiens from between 125,000 to 5,000 years
ago.  I can grasp that.

"Mu" (sometimes also known as Lemuria) is a term that was originally
scientific (well, "Lemuria" was . . . putting the Roman May festival aside
. . .), then picked up by mystics, and then dropped by science.  It has to
do with Lemurs (the marsupials, not the ghosts), and the
distribution/isolation of marsupials from placential mammals (something
like 90 million years ago).  This "waves of colonization/isolation" and
evolutionary competition plays very well with a few of the themes in 5HC.
(For example, the struggle between the Annese and the recent people from
Earth might look like marsupials vs. placental mammals.)

Gondwanaland hasn't been "mysticized," to the best of my knowledge, and
represents a period so far in the past (circa 300 million years ago) that
it predates mammals.  And that is what makes it a different one in the
list--there is nothing fuzzy about it.

Because it is lumped together with places that are obviously myths and
legends, one might suspect that the students and/or Wolfe were casting the
supercontinent as a "myth" of the evolutionists.  Yet this is clearly not
the case, since the three novellas are almost fervently pro-evolution: the
mysteries of evolution provide a great depth to the drama.

So it is much better to see the use of the term Gondwanda as being childish
pretense for "on Earth, a very long time ago."

To take the term literally means to consider pseudo-science notions of
either homo sapiens sapiens evolving on Earth before mammals ("cavemen and
dinosaurs" material, with the humans subsequently dying off and
evolving/emerging again 300 million years later), or extra-solar homo
sapiens sapiens arriving on Earth before mammals (and then dying off,
rather like the Norse colonies in Greenland). Either one threatens
evolutionary theory: the first because there is no fossil record suggesting
it is even remotely possible; the second because it transplants the entire
"human evolution" model with an outside source, making human evolution as
we know it a lie, a picture from a jigsaw puzzle where the crucial pieces
are all in another box all together.  Again, because the novellas are so
pro-evolution, these options represent quite a twist.

I wouldn't want to argue "extra-terrestrial humans colonized Earth" as the
Official Strong Case, but I do think it amounts to an Official Weak Case.
The text seems to allow for it, but yes, it puts a further twist on things
far more tangential than, for example, the twist of having VRT write "A
Story," which is really quite central to my appreciation of the book as a
whole (because it unambiguously changes the entire framing context of "A
Story," turning a simple romance into a complex tangle of
history/autobiography/confession).

>said dreamily. 'We were mostly long, and lived in holes between the roots of

This detail from the text reminds me of the weird Edenic world at the end
of Wolfe's online story "Copperhead," as well as Lotus Land, and Jack
Vance's alien race of Star Kings (from novel THE STAR KING) and their weird
Edenic world.

=mantis=

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From: Tony Ellis <littlesense at necronomicon.co.uk>
Date: Fri, 26 Apr 2002 11:17:19 +0000

Dan'l wrote:
>places.

Only if you ignore something yourself: the not-insubstantial continent of
Africa, which is also in the list the Old Wise One gives.

>Second, that all the names in question were coined in the last three

The Old Wise One has pulled these names out of the minds of passing starship
crews. Check out the speech preceding the list of names, which begins "We
came here either recently or a long, long time ago." He says that when the
Shadow Children try to remember the name of 'their' home, they "hear also
the mind-singing", ie pick up the thoughts of, passing starship crews, and
"these thoughts come into our songs." The next sentence is the list of
names.

So. The Shadow Children know that 'their' home is somewhere long ago and far
away. They find some pretty names for places long ago and far away in the
minds of passing starship crews that seem to strike a chord, so these are
the ones they come up with.

>.it places directly in your court, or the court

Because, m'lud, VRT isn't telling his own story.

We can suspect the narratives of Latro and Severian, because it is the story
of their own lives that they are telling. They have a vested interest. Horn
may or may not have fibbed in TBOTLS, but it is in TBOTSS, where he is
telling his own story, that Wolfe makes it blindingly obvious that he is
editing the truth.

It is in 'V.R.T.' that Victor tells his own story, it is there that he
actually plays the role of a Wolfe narrator, and it is there, sure enough,
that he lies like a trooper. But in 'A Story' he doesn't have the Wolfe
narrator's motivation to lie, because he isn't telling his own story.
Telling the story of Sandwalker falsely won't get him out of gaol, and we
have no reason in any case to believe that it was written with his gaolers
in mind.

Something that reinforces my belief is the fact that when his narratives are
suspect, Wolfe makes this quite obvious. Horn and the narrator of Seven
American Nights openly confess to lying. In 'V.R.T.' we have whopping great
big clues like a change of handwriting. But there's nothing internal to 'A
Story' to suggest that it is unreliable (that I'm aware of), and externally,
in the other novellas, we get the confirmation of many places and events,
suggesting that, instead, we should view this as a story that really
happened.

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