{ "export": { "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/3402", "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": 3402, "subject": "words in favor of PEACE timelines", "messages": 1, "voices": 1, "first": "2002-08-10T15:05:41+00:00", "last": "2002-08-10T15:05:41+00:00" }, "messages": [ { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "Michael Andre-Driussi", "address": "mantis at siriusfiction.com" }, "date": "2002-08-10T15:05:41+00:00", "subject": "(urth) words in favor of PEACE timelines", "in_reply_to": null, "reply_link": null, "blocks": [ { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "Roy wrote:\n\"He was one of the tallest men I ever saw, I guess, but most of the time he\nstood like he didn't have any chest at all, all hollowed out there, so he\ndidn't look much taller than the average.\" (117) Even slouched, Tilly was\nabove average height." }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "Ach. Scratch Tilly from the sepia roster.\n\nStill, Tilly is connected to the episode by way of his ties to the carnies;\nSmart is connected by his inheritance of Tilly's business. If sepia man =\nSmart, then the photo presumably was taken in the brief time of Smart's\nrunning of that pharmacy (circa 1922).\n\nRobert Borski wrote against PEACE timeline construction:" }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "No, you have it right exactly. Because as I've been attempting to\ndemonstrate all along it is not possible to construct a hard and true\nchronological ordering of the events in PEACE. There are just too many\ncontradictions and mutually-exclusive events." }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "From my perspective, and I have worked on the timelines, the text contains\nisland-continents of stability (the main narrative of each section)\nsurrounded by a sea of uncertainty (the frametale, mainly, which aside from\nbeing strange itself, bleeds oddities into the main narrative at transition\npoints). The dream-like quality of the frametale makes it just like the\ncorridors of time, and like those corridors, the frametale has \"backstage\"\nelements to it, where the main narrative is \"on stage.\"\n\nAmong the sections, the fifth is the most tricky: cold house prank (how\ndoes this relate to anything?), Doris (how does this relate to anything?),\netc. It is almost as if Gene Wolfe is taking off the training wheels that\nwere present in the previous sections. OTOH certain elements are very\nclear and true, so clear and true that we don't debate them, for example:\nthe sterility of the Americans (woman at the plant who did not have\nchildren) echoes that of Tilly, Smart, and A. D. Weer; the arrival of\nforeign workers hints at the post-American landscape Weer has seen in\nvisions (races of new colors, including the \"orange\" tribe which in this\ncase becomes the tribe of the fake orange); Charlie Turner's appearance\nvalidates Smart's weird story; etc.\n\nThe most thorny tangles, iirc, are the visits to Drs. B and V and the\nCharlie Turner episode. One solution for Sherry Gold at the office\ninvolved a timesplice mid-paragraph! The Dr. V thread is pretty clearly a\ncomposite of many visits, begun when Weer is plump president and moving\nbackward to when he was a skinny middle-age loser. The doctor's office is\n\"corridor of time\" area, where dream-like things happen." }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "Example 3: Once again, I cite the scene where Den has sex with Sherry Gold.\nSixteen-year old Sherry shows up at Weer's door and Den invites her in. Says\nDen to the girl: \"Excuse me for not rising. I have suffered a stroke\nresulting in partial paralysis of my leg.\" Kind-hearted Sherry, though\nnervous (as Wolfe tells us), responds, \"That's all right.\"\n\nBut how can this be? Den's stroke is years in the future--long after he has\nsex with Sherry Gold. It's clearly impossible--and yet there it is, right on\nthe page before us. Possible solutions include: 1) post-stroke Den is\nlooking back to the encounter and re-imagining it from the perspective of\nhis current present, complete with revisionist dialogue; 2) Den, adrift in a\nmaze of memories, is conflating events, as confused or disoriented as anyone\nwho's suffered a stroke, or in the twilight of their life has vivid\nrecollections of their childhood, but can't remember what they had to eat\nyesterday." }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "Surely we have discussed more options than that!\n3) A. D. Weer is dead (true) and his ghost is haunting the past (text\nestablishes that ghosts can come from the future) in realtime:\n\n3a) like Scrooge (and Billy Pilgrim), Weer cannot alter the past, only\nrelive it. The other ghosts cannot hear anything that deviates from the\nscript; Sherry Gold in the case sited, or Dr. Black when warned of son\nBobby's soon-to-come fall.\n3b) like (who? Bill Murray's character in \"Groundhog Day\"?), Weer can\nalter the past and is presenting us with the ameliorated \"novelization\"\n(Walter Mitty) of his life.\n\n4) A. D. Weer is dead and is in effect summoning ghosts to recreate the\npast in his memory mansion prison as he struggles against this\nself-knowledge of his own post-death existence:\n\n4a) like 3a\n4b) like 3b\n\n=mantis=\n\n\nSirius Fiction\nbooklets on Gene Wolfe, John Crowley\n29 copies of \"Snake's-hands\" until OP!\nhttp://www.siriusfiction.com/" } ] } ] }