Hi Dan. You suggested, in a manner I'm not quite sure how to take, Tolkien. You must miss the point of my post. It is not that I really want trees to be sentient. It is that I am trying to establish that Blue and Ushas are the same place. If there are living trees on Urth like there definitely, definitely are on Ushas, then I've just established one more thing that they have in common, like being flooded and having a green planet near them and having huge sea creatures and having the same year and the same gravity. I don't necessarily want to read about sentient trees. I want to establish so many connections between Blue and Ushas that the burden of proof shifts away from me to all those doubters. Whatever. I think I'll stop posting for a while. My whole point is that Wolfe is subtle - not that I think he didn't get good use out of the trees, but that he likes to use background information to reveal what's going on (ie - The elm tree planted by Eleanor Bold, the judges daughter, fell last night, waking me from my slumber ... 200 pages later ... Mrs. Porter plants endangered American species on the graves of her friends = that kind of subtle treatment of background detail, if you know what I mean).
Chalk it all up to psychotropic drugs. Naked Lunch with alzabo analeptic. Marc Aramini