Long time no see, Wombat!
You wrote a good post and I could follow all of it except for this one part:
3 quoted lines
Pas
as demiurge is such a clear image that it's hard to believe that he
didn't intend for the work to function, in part at least, as an attack on Gnosticism; he may have teased the ideas out further as he composed the later novels.
With this line you seem to be saying that there is a form of Gnosticism that looks favorably upon the Demiurge. I do not know of one, even after thinking about it for a few days. When I think of Gnosticism in genre, I think of (pro-Gnostic) A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS, and there, without a doubt, the Demiurge is the big bad guy who pretends to be the transcendent god, but is not. The other cases that come to my mind follow this pattern pretty closely. Most of the material I've read about Gnosticism comes down very hard on the Demiurge.
So if you really did mean that, could you please tell me which brand of Gnosticism you are referring to?
Or are you saying the opposite: that Wolfe is too soft on the Demiurge to qualify as pro-Gnostic? (I.e., too much sympathy of the Devil.) Now that I could believe, as evidenced by the material above.
(I'm not trying to be difficult!)
=mantis=