{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/4250",
    "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": 4250,
    "subject": "urth-urth.net Digest, Vol 3, Issue 8",
    "messages": 11,
    "voices": 8,
    "first": "2004-11-30T11:08:44+00:00",
    "last": "2004-12-01T20:28:59+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<20041130190833.05A10393E@sitemail.everyone.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "turin",
        "address": "turin at hell.com"
      },
      "date": "2004-11-30T11:08:44+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) Re: urth-urth.net Digest, Vol 3, Issue 8",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "<(Gee ... I hope you're male under that name...)\n\nWhat if I'm a girl?  I'm not but we really can't tell under the internet.  This is kind of a joke, and I'm not suggesting anything that you do, but I have noticed some people feel its dishonest to pretend to be the opposite sex online, not that I've ever pretended to be a girl. But unless you are going to meet in person, I dont know if it matters. I do think bodies are important, but in text we are genderless.\n\n\nI can't remember but I don't think Gaiman wrote an article on Lewis but he talks about him at length (for Gaiman) in the live journal, which I read for about a year when American Gods came out and when I decided that Gaiman really wasn't a very good novelist.  He also talks about him in \"An Early Life Furnished in Michael Moorcock\".  Gaiman does like Chesterton Dunsany Lindsey and Wolfe, but is almost completely silent on Tolkien, and I can't remember how he feels about Morris and Macdonald.\n\n<That much is clearly true. In fact, there are times when he comes\n<parlously close to Poughkeepsie, to borrow Le Guin's trope.\n\nWhat is poughkeepsie??? Le Guin is a very interesting person with a very interesting family history.\n\nI'm kind of repeating myself, butt... I do think military sci-fi is very conservative, a lot of it is also Cold War.  And yes sci-fi does have a big conservative vein, but I dont think it dominates the genre or that Christian writers should just be labeled conservative in the fundamentalist, spooky way American like to define conservative now, which has nothing to do with small government or tight budgets, even for the Republicans.  I don't consider Tolkien or Wolfe to be conservative writers by the new definition but perhaps as far as small government is concerned. I think they write about war, because it is so horrible.  I can't remember if Wolfe was in a war but I think he was in the military, and Tolkien was at the Somme, and most of his friends died in the war.  I think that informs his work more than anything, with his relationship with his wife a close second.\n\nI don't want to get into a long discussion on what allegory is, but I think it is unavoidable.  My idea of allegory is very limited, it must be didactic, 100% translatable into an ideology, and ultimately robs the narrative as being able to take place in a possible world.  That is, it steals the story from the text.  \n\n<but both seemed to have first and foremost \n<in their minds the process of _telling a story_;\n\nThis depends on what you mean by telling a story, if we want to think of people sitting around a camp fire talking to each other, I'd still say the same thing.   I don't think Spenser cared very much about story in the Faerie Queene. I think Tolkien cared more about story than Lewis. But I think story is entangled with how much you *believe* in the construction, how much complexity you assign it. Allegory for me is the shallow  end of the spectrum when treating the narrative as a virtual world, and I think this is often very proportional to wanting to tell a story,  at least with very long stories and no parables or fables. To imagine that world is to a certain degree to believe in it as a possible world, no matter how improbable and whether it is realized or not, because that is how we attempt to reconstruct the *real* world from our sensory input, through imagination.  In this sense all known worlds are virtual worlds, and so I think Tolkien believes in Ea more than Lewis or Spenser. Spenser's allegory may be a collection of platonic forms in what he thought of as the real world but it is not a collection of what he thought of as people or natural processes.\n\n<  ... well, not the question of \"what it means to be a nonhuman\n<person,\" but all the others\n\n       I am talking about Tolkien and Wolfe more than the others.  Whether it's talking animals, androids, gods, or aliens they are still nonhuman persons.  It is impossible not to anthropromorphize them, though.  Tolkien in the Silmarillion wanted to write a narrative history of a nonhuman species, the elves, and then during the writing of the later Quenta S. despaired at being able to accomplish such a thing. Elves in many ways are very similar to human, but to say that they are human in another guise, is to accuse Tolkien of allegory, and Tolkien would say no elves are independent of humans, what I can't describe is not their fault but mine, the limits of my imagination. This is all in Morgoth's Ring.\n\nI think Tolkien did think about the socio-political though not as much the economic situation in Middle-Earth during the Third Age in depth.  Back to the racial complaint, if you look at the military technology of Sauron's human soldiers, the Haradrim, Corsairs of Umbar, Southrons, and Easterlings they are very similar to Zulus, English privateers, Indians (of India), and Mongols.  With the exception of the pirates, South Africa, India, and China were all British colonies.  Sauron's chief servants are black Numenoreans, which represent Atlantis, the hypothetical mother culture of Indo-europe, just as the Quenya language was supposed to be to a certain degree an imaginary reconstruction of Indo-european.  Sauron is if we must make comparisions, industrialized, imperial, colonial Britain, where everyone is either a wage slave, an actual slave, or a bureaucratic and elite slave. In fact Sauron's most powerful servant and commanders, the Nazgul, are the greatest slaves.  Of course Tolkien believed in free will and not social determinism and so they are culpable (but so are the free peoples in their isolationism) people have been lied to, coerced, and enslaved by a stronger force.  Tolkien is not a luddite though, in several essays he distinguishes between two \"magics\" which also apply to culture and technology, Art and the Machine, and I don't know what else to call magic but benign technology which works with rather than against natural forms.  It seems information technology, nanotech, and genetics can create the extremes Tolkien is talking about.  The Lord of the Rings, though was written before all of these ideas, but it has a cybernetic feel to it. I believe Wolfe to a large degree bridges this gap. \n\nAs for Mieville.  This is simplistic but lt's look at Perdido Street Station. Isaac is obviously Isaac Newton with his unified field theory to replace religious cosmology, at the beginning of the novel Isaac basically says religion is the opiate of the masses or rather the last bastion of the weak when talking to the water manipulating slug about his god, rationalism and science. His lover has a scarab's head, Lin?, and represents an interracial or intercultural forbidden relationship outisde of marriage of course.  The intellectuals, artists, and scientists are pitted against a fascist government masquerading under philanthropist venture capitalists and captains of industry who only want to develop certain technologies which will allow them to maintain control.  New Crobuzon is present day New York and 19th century London, I think it depends on the situation.  I do not know what the remade are, and every government makes terrible weapons, but maybe he thinks \"real\" socialists wouldn't.  I know he has a phd in socio-economics or something like that and wrote several papers on Marx. I haven't read any good articles discussing his work but I've read some articles he has written and one interview.  I haven't read The Scar yet, just a little bit of King Rat and PSS.  \n\nI dont know if I want to read anymore of his work, not because of his ideology, but just how heterogenous and manic his style is of writing is.  I think he might be churning out books too quickly.  I am biased towards books that take longer to write, but I dont think that's always the case, but for instead.  Wolfe is an exception for me. So far Ive liked everything Ive read, and he is very prolific.  Some people can get away with it I guess. He is a very patient writer, and I like writing that is subtle and restrained and often leaves out the most dramatic bits.  That is a convention of romance, of obscuring the most important parts, because they are inexpressable.\n\nEOT;"
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "message_id": "<5.2.1.1.0.20041130201926.02d20eb0@pop.ntlworld.com>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Matthew Malthouse",
        "address": "matthew.malthouse at ntlworld.com"
      },
      "date": "2004-11-30T12:21:38+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) Re: urth-urth.net Digest, Vol 3, Issue 8",
      "in_reply_to": "<20041130190833.05A10393E@sitemail.everyone.net>",
      "reply_link": "header",
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "At 19:08 30/11/2004, Turin wrote:\n<(Gee ... I hope you're male under that name...)\n\nWhat if I'm a girl?"
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "The it should have been Brava! not Bravo!\n\nMatthew "
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "message_id": "<1f76173704113012362b18d412@mail.gmail.com>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes",
        "address": "danldo at gmail.com"
      },
      "date": "2004-11-30T12:36:12+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) Re: urth-urth.net Digest, Vol 3, Issue 8",
      "in_reply_to": "<20041130190833.05A10393E@sitemail.everyone.net>",
      "reply_link": "header",
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "<(Gee ... I hope you're male under that name...)\n\nWhat if I'm a girl?  "
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "[...]"
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "I do think bodies are important, but in text we are genderless."
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Ah. Well, gender doesn't _generally_ matter in text - my parenthetical\nremark  was a sort of grammatical joke. I'd just greeted you with a \n\"Bravo! Bravissimo!\" and if you were female, \"Brava! Bravissima!\" \nwould have been the correct form. Nothing more, honest; no intent\nthat the Urth list should be a \"he-man woman hater's club\" or any\nsuch - that would exclude a few of our most valued contributors."
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "I can't remember but I don't think Gaiman wrote an article on\nLewis but he talks about him at length (for Gaiman) in the live\njournal, which I read for about a year when American Gods\ncame out and when I decided that Gaiman really wasn't a very\ngood novelist. "
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "I'll have to go check out his webjournal - I hope that bit is still\non line. And I agree that NG is not a \"very good\" novelist - he\nhas written some good prose fiction but he's very uneven, and\nhe's too busy avoiding commitment to anything in a sort of \npostpostmodern-ironic way for my taste.\n\n\n[...]"
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "<That much is clearly true. In fact, there are times when he comes\n<parlously close to Poughkeepsie, to borrow Le Guin's trope.\n\nWhat is poughkeepsie??? "
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "A town in New York where (if I recall correctly) IBM has or used to\nhave its main offices or somesuch. Le Guin wrote an essay back\nin the '70s called \"From Elfland to Poughkeepsie,\" in which she\nbasically trashed Katherine Kurtz's \"Deryni\" novels as an example\nof commercial \"fantasy\" that wasn't really fantasy - basically on the\ngrounds that, though there was magic and whatnot, the concerns\nof the plot and characters was fundamentally mundane, and the\nbook could as easily have taken place in Poughkeepsie as in a\nfantasy world. For a number of fantasy fans and critics, as a \nresult of this essay, \"Poughkeepsie\" has come to be something of\na shorthand for mundane pseudo-fantasy, especially of a kind \nthat concentrates heavily on political pragmatism."
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "Le Guin is a very interesting person with a very interesting family\nhistory."
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "... yes, and?"
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "I'm kind of repeating myself, butt... I do think military sci-fi is very\nconservative, a lot of it is also Cold War. "
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Grin. Absolutely. And that's because almost all of it is written by\npeople who grew up thinking that _Starship Trooper_ was just\nthe very bestest book ever written - people like J*rr* P**n*ll* and \nD*v*d Dr*k* and so on."
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "And yes sci-fi does have a big conservative vein, but I dont think\nit dominates the genre or that Christian writers should just be\nlabeled conservative in the fundamentalist, spooky way American\nlike to define conservative now,"
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "That drives me absolutely batshit. These people are _not_\nconservatives; they are \"neoconservatives,\" followers of a radical\npolitical programme (laid out by the \"New American Century\"\ndocument, our own homegorwn _Mein Kampf_) and standing in\nalmost diametrical opposition to the great conservative tradition.\n\nGrumble, growl."
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "which has nothing to do with small government or tight budgets,\neven for the Republicans.  "
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "(I'd like to give the Republicans a tight budget.)\n\n[...]"
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "I can't remember if Wolfe was in a war "
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Korea."
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "but I think he was in the military, and Tolkien was at the Somme,\nand most of his friends died in the war.  I think that informs his\nwork more than anything, with his relationship with his wife a\nclose second."
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "I'd put these third and fourth, after his linguistic obsessions and\nhis desire for a \"truly British\" mythology. Also somewhere in the\nmix is his Catholicism, possibly even before his relationship with\nhis \"Luthien.\""
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "I don't want to get into a long discussion on what allegory is, but\nI think it is unavoidable.  My idea of allegory is very limited, it\nmust be didactic, 100% translatable into an ideology, and\nultimately robs the narrative as being able to take place in a\npossible world.  That is, it steals the story from the text."
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "H'mmm. I think that's too limiting; it seems to me that both the \nNarnia books and Tolkien's own \"Leaf by Niggle\" are both quite\nclearly allegorical. (One could I suppose argue that neither \nNarnia nor the world in which \"LbN\" takes place are \"possible,\"\nbut I think that's limiting \"possibility\" far too much.)"
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "I don't think Spenser cared very much about story in the Faerie\nQueene. I think Tolkien cared more about story than Lewis. But\nI think story is entangled with how much you *believe* in the\nconstruction, how much complexity you assign it. "
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "This, and the rest of the paragraph (which I'm cutting for brevity),\nseems to me to suggest that \"story\" to you is primarily a matter of\nworld-building? Whereas to me it is a matter of relating events \nthat matter to the audient (whether reader, listener, or viewer).\nThe most common, but not the only, way of making them matter is\nby narrating them through the eyes of _characters_ who matter to\nthe audient, and having the events matter to those characters.\n\nWorldbuilding is fascinating in its own right. It places the \ncharacters and events in a context in which they can matter -\nbut (again) that's not the only way to do it. Classic fairy-stories\nlike \"Red Riding Hood\" and \"Cinderella\" take place in a world\nthat's so generic it hardly exists at all; their events matter to\nthe audient (if they do) because the audient is able to identify\nto some extent with the character. In this case, the vagueness \nof the world-construct is actually a help - it has allowed the \nstories to remain accessible to audients in a wide variety of \ncultural matrices (though not all), rather the way a more \nabstract and \"cartoony\" style of rendering often makes it\neasier for audients to identify with characters in comics and\nanimation.\n\n(Incidentally, your comment that \"In this sense all known \nworlds are virtual worlds\" strikes me as very close to what I \nmost dislike in postmodernism, its willful rejection of the \nconcept of _reality_.)\n\nI certainly agree with your point about Tolkien and nonhuman\npersons ... he seemed to be hungry for contact with something\nother-than-human. (If he'd been born a bit later and a bit less\nintelligent I suspect he might have made a good UFO cultist.)"
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "I think Tolkien did think about the socio-political though not as\nmuch the economic situation in Middle-Earth during the Third\nAge in depth. "
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "H'mmm. I think I agree here; the problem is that people seem to\naccuse him of giving _no_ thought to the economics of Middle-\nearth, and that's blatantly false. There are farms, merchants, and\nso on sneaking around the edges of the War of the Ring. \n\nIt's truer of the _Silmarillion_, I must admit, but the _S_ is written\non a stylistically elevated level where I wouldn't really expect \neconomics to enter the picture - or perhaps it does, but Elvish\neconomics are so alien that we can't recognize them? (It's hard\nto imagine Elves farming!)\n\nYour point about the similarity of \"Sauron's human soldiers,\" to"
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "Zulus, English privateers, Indians (of India), and Mongols"
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "has some merit, but is I suspect less a deliberate analogy or\nallegory than simply a failure of Tolkien's imagination (horrible \nthough this is to say) to exceed the ethnoracial stereotypes he'd \nabsorbed in the boy's books of writers like Wilkie Collins as, \nwell, a boy. "
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "... just as the Quenya language was supposed to be to a certain\ndegree an imaginary reconstruction of Indo-european. "
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Ummm, no, not really. Quenya and Sindarin were patterned after\nFinnish and Welsh, though I can never seem to remember which \nwas which. It is the root language for all the Elvish and High Human\n(i.e., Numenorian and related) tongues of Middle-earth. As such it\nbears a relationship to those tongues similar to that which the\nhypothesized and hypostasized Indo-European tongue that so \nfascinated philologists of Tolkien's generation must bear to the\nmodern languages of the I-E family - except, of course, that \nQuenya was still a living spoken language among the Eldar \nof Middle-earth, and the Elves and Ainur of the True West. "
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "Tolkien is not a luddite though, in several essays he distinguishes\nbetween two \"magics\" which also apply to culture and technology,"
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Tolkien's distinction reflects  the medieval (and Catholic) distinction \nbetween _magia_ and _goetia_, one of which was the summoning \nand binding of demonic  (or other spiritual) entities to gain power, \nwhile the other, which would include such studies as astrology and\nalchemy, was the manipulation of natural \"influences\" to achieve\ndesirable results. The one was inherently evil; the other was good\nor evil depending on the results sought and the means used."
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "Art and the Machine, and I don't know what else to call magic\nbut benign technology which works with rather than against natural\nforms. "
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Pretty much, yeah. And you know that Saruman has really fallen\nbecause he's stepped beyond this, from magic into sorcery, so to\nspeak, in his desire for power (reified in the Ring and in his evil\ncon/de/structions).\n\nComments on _Perdido Street Station_ skipped; I would have to \nreread the damn thin to really follow them, and I'm not prepared to \ndo so at this time."
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "I dont know if I want to read anymore of his work, not because of\nhis ideology, but just how heterogenous and manic his style is of\nwriting is.  "
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Oh my goodness, yes. "
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "I think he might be churning out books too quickly.  I am biased\ntowards books that take longer to write, but I dont think that's always\nthe case, but for instead.  Wolfe is an exception for me. So far Ive\nliked everything Ive read, and he is very prolific. "
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Well, it helps to keep in mind that he's been publishing for over \nthirty years now. He seems to average about a book a year, plus\nshort stories; but he also writes full-time, and definitely takes the\ntime to do multiple, careful drafts of his work. "
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "Some people can get away with it I guess. He is a very patient\nwriter, and I like writing that is subtle and restrained and often\nleaves out the most dramatic bits.  That is a convention of\nromance, of obscuring the most important parts, because they\nare inexpressable."
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Yes, I agree - it's something that (for example) Cabell did a\ngreat deal. And both Cabell and Wolfe occasionally go just\na bit too far for my taste, refusing to narrate key points of the\nnarrative - but for very different reasons. Cabell, for example,\nseems to have avoided a description of Dom Manuel's \n\"blasphemous communion\" precisely because it would have\nbeen unpublishable under the Comstock laws that were in \neffect when he wrote. Wolfe seems to be censoring what his\nnarrators cannot bear to look at.\n\n--Dan'l "
        },
        {
          "kind": "sig",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "www.livejournal.com/users/sturgeonslawyer\n\"Saddam would still be in power if he were the President\nof the United States, and the world would be a lot better off.\"\n     -- The Forty-Third President, 10/8/04"
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "message_id": "<20041130215958.80427.qmail@web50306.mail.yahoo.com>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Nathan Spears",
        "address": "spearofsolomon at yahoo.com"
      },
      "date": "2004-11-30T14:00:01+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) Re: urth-urth.net Digest, Vol 3, Issue 8",
      "in_reply_to": "<20041130190833.05A10393E@sitemail.everyone.net>",
      "reply_link": "header",
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Good grief.  I feel like I'm drowning in ideas."
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "<(Gee ... I hope you're male under that name...)\n\nWhat if I'm a girl?  I'm not but we really can't tell under the internet.  This is\nkind of a joke, and I'm not suggesting anything that you do, but I have noticed\nsome people feel its dishonest to pretend to be the opposite sex online, not that\nI've ever pretended to be a girl. But unless you are going to meet in person, I\ndont know if it matters. I do think bodies are important, but in text we are\ngenderless."
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "I buy this.  I'm not sure what he's getting at, except that your name isn't exactly\nflowery.  Also, I don't think people like genderlessness; The Left Hand of Darkness\nderives power from it precisely because the idea is so inhuman.  I think we assign\ngenders to people in our imagination if only to comfort ourselves."
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "<That much is clearly true. In fact, there are times when he comes\n<parlously close to Poughkeepsie, to borrow Le Guin's trope.\n\nWhat is poughkeepsie??? Le Guin is a very interesting person with a very\ninteresting family history."
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "The only time I've ever heard of Poughkeepsie was in the film The French Connection,\nwhere Popeye Doyle says,\n\n\"When's the last time you picked your feet, Willy? Who's your connection Willy?\nWhat's his name?...I've got a man in Poughkeepsie who wants to talk to you. You ever\nbeen to Poughkeepsie? Huh? Have you ever been to Poughkeepsie?\"\n\nUrsula LeGuin wrote a book called From Elfland to Poughkeepsie.  I can't find a\nsummary of what it's about, but you can buy it here for the reasonable price of\n$400.\n\nhttp://www.arcadiabooks.org/leguin/bibliography/abebooks_titles_editions/1973-from_elfland-Pendragon-1973.htm\n\nSpeaking of buying books, has anyone gotten this one yet?\nhttp://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0618517650/103-3599354-1920666?v=glance"
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "I think Tolkien did think about the socio-political though not as much the\neconomic situation in Middle-Earth during the Third Age in depth.  Back to the\nracial complaint, if you look at the military technology of Sauron's human\nsoldiers, the Haradrim, Corsairs of Umbar, Southrons, and Easterlings they are\nvery similar to Zulus, English privateers, Indians (of India), and Mongols.  With\nthe exception of the pirates, South Africa, India, and China were all British\ncolonies.  Sauron's chief servants are black Numenoreans, which represent\nAtlantis, the hypothetical mother culture of Indo-europe, just as the Quenya\nlanguage was supposed to be to a certain degree an imaginary reconstruction of\nIndo-european.  Sauron is if we must make comparisions, industrialized, imperial,\ncolonial Britain, where everyone is either a wage slave, an actual slave, or a\nbureaucratic and elite slave. In fact Sauron's most powerful servant and\ncommanders, the Nazgul, are the greatest slaves.  Of course Tolkien believed in\nfree will and not social determinism and so they are culpable (but so are the free\npeoples in their isolationism) people have been lied to, coerced, and enslaved by\na stronger force.  Tolkien is not a luddite though, in several essays he\ndistinguishes between two \"magics\" which also apply to culture and technology, Art\nand the Machine, and I don't know what else to call magic but benign technology\nwhich works with rather than against natural forms.  It seems information\ntechnology, nanotech, and genetics can create the extremes Tolkien is talking\nabout.  The Lord of the Rings, though was written before all of these ideas, but\nit has a cybernetic feel to it. I believe Wolfe to a large degree bridges this\ngap. "
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "When I said that Tolkien didn't consider his politico-economic background, and\nframed some potential questions, I was trying to present Mieville's viewpoint, and\nnot my own.  Honestly, although I like some of the things said here about his world,\nI could care less.  Analyzing The Lord of the Rings for political, economic, and\nsocial models seems to me to be like studying each facial feature of a woman from a\ndistance of one inch.  I'd miss the beauty for looking too closely.\n\nYou really lost me here.  I can get behind most of what you're saying, except for\nthat business about magic as benign technology and the cybernetic feel to LotR, but\nI can't follow your train of thought.  Did you just want to get back to Wolfe by any\nmeans necessary?"
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "I dont know if I want to read anymore of [Mieville's] work, not because of his\nideology,\nbut just how heterogenous and manic his style is of writing is."
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Hear here.  Also, his stories aren't very satisfying."
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "Wolfe is an\nexception for me. So far Ive liked everything Ive read, and he is very prolific. "
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "He has been prolific over a long period of time.  It seems that he writes short\nstories very quickly, but he works on his novels patiently; I remember reading that\nhe did four passes on Book of the New Sun, tying everything together."
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": " That is a convention of romance, of obscuring the most important parts, because\nthey are inexpressable."
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "I like the way you said that.\n\n\n\t\t"
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "message_id": "<00cc01c4d75b$eace7050$ae86d2d1@VALUED7B9600FA>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Alan Lewis",
        "address": "alanarc at frontiernet.net"
      },
      "date": "2004-11-30T20:12:12+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) OT: Poughkeepsie",
      "in_reply_to": "<1f76173704113012362b18d412@mail.gmail.com>",
      "reply_link": "header",
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "I think I can see where Leguin derived the idea of using the idea of \nPoughkeepsie in this way.  You see, there's a saying I've heard employed \nmany times paritucarly amongst political pundits when a concept, or work may \nhave broad and mainstream appeal, one says, \"That'll play in Peoria.\" \nHowever, there is a lesser known variation one hears, \"That'll play in \nPoughkeepsie.\"\n\nAs to why these places are singled out to represent the mainstream, I think \nit's largely a matter of alliteration of course.  But there is a \ngeographical element as well no doubt.  In the case of Poughkeepsie, one \nmust realize that it is about 60 miles north of Culture Central, NYC.  I'm \nreminded of the way Ichabob Crane in the person of Johnny Depp leaves the \ncity and travels north by coach into what Tim Burton would have us \nunderstand is the wilds of Sleepy Hollow, a journey that takes him a whole \nday, but is far enough out there for figures like a Headless Horseman to \nbecome possible.  This despite the fact that Sleepy Hollow is only about 30 \nmiles north of the city.  Point being, once out of the city, aw shucks, it \nshooor does get darks at night way out there, and to a city person \nPoughkeepsie must have seemed like a whole other world.\n\nAll this could hardly be further off topic, for which I apologize, but this \npoint has always interested me, particularly since I make my living working \nin that very same Poughkeepsie, protecting its children.\n\nAlan "
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "message_id": "<6985CF34-4356-11D9-96CD-000D933E2CD2@comcast.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "emily zilch",
        "address": "emily0 at comcast.net"
      },
      "date": "2004-11-30T21:04:07+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) genderlessness",
      "in_reply_to": "<20041130215958.80427.qmail@web50306.mail.yahoo.com>",
      "reply_link": "header",
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "{ 20041130 | Nathan Spears } \"Also, I don't think people like \ngenderlessness; The Left Hand of Darkness derives power from it \nprecisely because the idea is so inhuman.  I think we assign genders to \npeople in our imagination if only to comfort ourselves.\"\n\nsome of us on this list are intersexed. this is definitely true, which \nmakes it a fertile but near-untouched topic. has anyone else read emma \nbull's absolutely amazing \"bone dance\"?\n\nunfortunately, none of the URTH works with which i am familiar deals \nwith the subject of gender/sex in any way that is not standard trope \n(i.e. dorcas).\n\nsIkOzU\n*****************\nYou know what I blame this on the breakdown of? Society!\n- Moe, The Simpsons"
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "message_id": "<024b01c4d7ba$dc1a8170$4c1e4b0a@vcorp.ad.vrsn.com>",
      "from": {
        "name": "James Wynn",
        "address": "thewynns at earthlink.net"
      },
      "date": "2004-12-01T07:34:21+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) genderlessness",
      "in_reply_to": "<6985CF34-4356-11D9-96CD-000D933E2CD2@comcast.net>",
      "reply_link": "header",
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "unfortunately, none of the URTH works with which i am familiar deals\nwith the subject of gender/sex in any way that is not standard trope\n(i.e. dorcas)."
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Well, I don't believe that in the case of \"The Long Sun\" (albeit I admit I'm\nsomething of an ideological hermit on this count). But if you chose to adopt\nmy radical (but true) viewpoint, then perhaps it could improve your\nenjoyment of the novel.\n\nI say Incus is a woman passing as an augur, Chenille is a clone of Tussah\nderived from only his X chromosome, and Hyacinth is not a woman except in\nher soul (although I can't decide from my 4 or 5 available choices exactly\n*what* she is).\n\n~ Crush"
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "message_id": "<459535C5-43C7-11D9-94A5-000D933E2CD2@comcast.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "emily zilch",
        "address": "emily0 at comcast.net"
      },
      "date": "2004-12-01T10:32:18+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) Miéville",
      "in_reply_to": "<20041130190833.05A10393E@sitemail.everyone.net>",
      "reply_link": "header",
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "{ 20041130 | turin } \"As for Mieville.  This is simplistic but lt's \nlook at Perdido Street Station. Isaac is obviously Isaac Newton with \nhis unified field theory to replace religious cosmology, at the \nbeginning of the novel Isaac basically says religion is the opiate of \nthe masses or rather the last bastion of the weak when talking to the \nwater manipulating slug about his god, rationalism and science. His \nlover has a scarab's head, Lin?, and represents an interracial or \nintercultural forbidden relationship outisde of marriage of course.  \nThe intellectuals, artists, and scientists are pitted against a fascist \ngovernment masquerading under philanthropist venture capitalists and \ncaptains of industry who only want to develop certain technologies \nwhich will allow them to maintain control.  New Crobuzon is present day \nNew York and 19th century London, I think it depends on the situation.  \nI do not know what the remade are, and every government makes terrible \nweapons, but maybe he thinks \"real\" socialists wouldn't.  I know he has \na phd in socio-economics or something like that and wrote several \npapers on Marx. I haven't read any good articles discussing his work \nbut I've read some articles he has written and one interview.  I \nhaven't read The Scar yet, just a little bit of King Rat and PSS.\"\n\nThe Scar is an amazing work IMHO; I'm a big Mi?ville fan because he \nreally hits interesting topics, although like our URTH-writer few of \nhis characters are people you'd want to know. An example of his topics: \nIsaac's lover is *really* alien; their relationship reminds me of the \nones from Chip Delaney's \"Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand\". The \nsetting of New Crobuzon is fascinating; the plot and the setting are \nintertwined and almost incomprehensible to the reader in terms of \n(again) alienness. \"The Scar\" has the same features: a plot seriously \nshaped and about geography (the kingdom of the Ab-Dead! the ship \nitself! the underwater world!). And the latest book is All About \nGeography and how it makes the people in it.\n\nMi?ville tries not to write preachy works, but perhaps he rubs people \nwrong as Wolfe sometimes does me because of his personal interests. If \nthere is One Book to Rule Them All for each author (as is being \ndiscussed herein, also forgive the metaphor please), then for Mi?ville \nit is a struggle of the individual against societal limits (class, \nrace, gender - but, interestingly enough, *not* religion) AND a kind of \nsacredness of geography, whether manmade or natural. He doesn't \nidealise either nature or manmade but sees both as potentially harsh \nand ugly as well as beautiful and liberating.\n\nAlso, without spoiling things, the anti/hero of the latest book, \"The \nIron Council\", clearly shows that he thinks \"real\" socialists do Very \nBad Things. I don't think he labours under the misapprehension that any \none group has The Truth, although clearly some political views are more \nfavourable in his opinion, i.e. socialistic/communalistic movements \nagainst monarchies and oligarchies such as happened in the nineteenth \ncentury. I do think he remembers those times as when good things \nhappened because of anarchists, rebellions and socialistic movements; \nhe's not wrong, as that is how we got, say, the weekend off from \nworking. strikes and labour movements might not seem very \"fantasy\", \nbut frankly i welcome his works.\n\nSomeone on this list mentioned pamphleteering being, in England, that \nannoying bought-into-communism-in-college thing. I guess I take a \ndifferent view of \"Runagate Rampant\" and similar publications, thinking \nof the zine movement in the US and abroad as well as the rampant \nprivate publishing rants that characterised the era of the American \nRevolution and, before that, the time of great upheaval in \nseventeenth-century England. I think of Smith and Locke, both of whom \nwere published as leaflets. Perhaps we don't have that kind of \nleafletting here in the US; I certainly had no modern equivalent in my \nhead when I read about the paperings but rather thought of the early \nmodern era (1600s-1900s).\n\nAnyway, I know this is a Wolfe forum, but I thought the opportunity to \ndiscuss Mi?ville, who is one of my favourites, was too much to \noverpass.\n\nem0\nhttp://waitingfordorothy.blogspot.com\n*****************\nNever send a monster to do the work of an evil genius."
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "message_id": "<5.2.1.1.0.20041201213744.0309cdc0@pop.ntlworld.com>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Matthew Malthouse",
        "address": "matthew.malthouse at ntlworld.com"
      },
      "date": "2004-12-01T13:40:17+00:00",
      "subject": "Re: (urth) Miéville",
      "in_reply_to": "<459535C5-43C7-11D9-94A5-000D933E2CD2@comcast.net>",
      "reply_link": "header",
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "At 18:31 01/12/2004, you wrote:\nSomeone on this list mentioned pamphleteering being, in England, that \nannoying bought-into-communism-in-college thing. I guess I take a \ndifferent view of \"Runagate Rampant\" and similar publications,"
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "When you've seen Mi?ville selling the \"Socialist Worker\" outside the London \nSchool of Economics \"Runagate Rampant\" brings that to mind far more than \nSmith and Locke.  :)\n\nMatthew "
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "message_id": "<DE83C6F9-43E6-11D9-94A5-000D933E2CD2@comcast.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "emily zilch",
        "address": "emily0 at comcast.net"
      },
      "date": "2004-12-01T14:18:12+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) Miéville selling \"Socialist Worker\"",
      "in_reply_to": "<5.2.1.1.0.20041201213744.0309cdc0@pop.ntlworld.com>",
      "reply_link": "header",
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "{ 20041201 | Matthew Malthouse } \"When you've seen Mi?ville selling the \n\"Socialist Worker\" outside the London School of Economics \"Runagate \nRampant\" brings that to mind far more than Smith and Locke.  :)\"\n\ndo you have a photo? i want one!\n\nBTW i'm glad he lost his election bid that time b/c he'd've had no time \nto write \"the scar\" or \"IC\" if he were spending all his time giving a \nfruitbasket to the PM. (is that phrase an americanism?)\n\n-em0\n*****************\nYou know what I blame this on the breakdown of? Society!\n- Moe, The Simpsons"
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "message_id": "<BAY14-F32041369E5F5591456062FF4B00@phx.gbl>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Eric Mattingly",
        "address": "eric_mattingly at hotmail.com"
      },
      "date": "2004-12-01T20:28:59+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) genderlessness",
      "in_reply_to": "<6985CF34-4356-11D9-96CD-000D933E2CD2@comcast.net>",
      "reply_link": "header",
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Ah, but is Dorcas so standard?  The sick, secret joy of incest?  Of having \nbecome the lover to a child who may be your ancestor?  Of having become the \nfather (by way of ressurection) to your lover who is your ancestor?  I think \nthat there are gender complexities (the hierogrammates) and others, but they \nare cleverly disguised as common genre conventions.  But, I may be wrong \ntoo.\n\nNo, I haven't read the the book you mentioned.  I'll keep my eyes open, \nhowever.\n\neric\n\n\n\nA heretic is a man who sees with his own eyes.\n\n- Gotthold Ephraim Lessing"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}