Subject: (urth) New Wolfe Story at Subterranean Press

From: Matthew Keeley <matthew.keeley.1 at gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2007 16:26:44 +0000

Hi,

Subterraneanpress.com just posted a new Wolfe story. Should be an
interesting read. Does anyone know if Wolfe plans to publish any books with
Subterranean? It's a great small press, and I wouldn't mind seeing a Wolfe
volume from them.

-Matt
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From: Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <danldo at gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2007 17:49:57 +0000

Just read it. It looks like one of those stories Wolfe does occasionally
that seem kind of pointless at first and come back to whack you later.
This one hasn't come back to whack me yet, but I feel it in there trying
to figure itself out.

On 6/26/07, Matthew Keeley <matthew.keeley.1 at gmail.com> wrote:
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-- 
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes, writer, trainer, bon vivant
-----
http://www.livejournal.com/users/sturgeonslawyer
http://www.danehyoakes.com
Soon, where Toon Town once stood will be a string of gas stations,
inexpensive motels, restaurants that serve rapidly prepared food. Tire
salons, automobile dealerships and wonderful, wonderful billboards
reaching as far as the eye can see. My God, it'll be beautiful.

---

From: Joel Sieh <joel.sieh at gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2007 19:45:49 +0000

Yeah, same here.  It definitely has some dark undertones.

I get the following out of it so far (SPOILERS AHEAD):

- Robots are at the same time perfect (and more convenient), but not as good
as the real thing.

- Real is messy, imperfect, inconvenient, and is being slowly exterminated
for it.

- I think there's a contrast of impurity/purity implied there, too.  Roberta
teaches Julianne. Roberta is blond (pure), while Julianne is brunette
(impure) (according to some folklore - not sure where I'm getting that,
maybe pulpy werewolf stories).

- Roberta the robot girl pities Robber the robot dog, and through this we
get to see her self pity.  At the same time she pities him, she loves him.
Maybe she loves him because he is like her, or because she empathizes with
him.  And maybe her understanding is why he loves her (as shown by his
attempts to get back to her - I'd like to think it's because she understands
and values him, and not just because they're both robots).

- I think Julianne kills Rover the real dog....  At least that's what the
narrator wants us to think, without coming out and saying it.

- Maybe the narrator does, but I don't think so.  There's the repeated hedge
imagery when Rover comes into his yard and when the dog dies, but I think it
more likely that the narrator is some incarnation of death....  Or
something.  His talk at the beginning about the inevitability of death, his
fascination with the girls, his attempt at proving the value of living
things through his dog-swapping experiment, and his collection of the dead
dog at the end lead me in that direction.  As a side note, I thought
"penetrated" was an odd word choice in the following sentence: "Roberta's
puppy had penetrated the hedge that separates the Robinson's back yard from
our own."  With the screaming in the same paragraph, it could take on a
violent or sinister quality like what Michael Swanwick says of "A Solar
Labyrinth".

- A question that popped out at me while I was reading:  Who is the "our" in
the "our own" in the sentence quoted above?

- The narrator fixates on innocence.  He mentions it when he talks about the
girls and baby dogs/animals.  There may be parallels between his
relationships to the girls and their relationships to the dogs.

- Some other things I noticed:  Both the narrator and Roberta tried to
teach.  Robots, children, and small animals share the quality of innocence,
and the narrator definitely does not (or believes he does not).

Just a bunch of bits and pieces.  That's what I often end up with at the end
of a first reading of Gene Wolfe, however.  Not quite enough to put it all
together, yet.  Maybe it'll help move the discussion along, though!

--Joel

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From: Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <danldo at gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2007 21:03:43 +0000

One bit-and-piece that got left out: Roberta and Robber both have
"Rob" names. So do the Robinsons. Are they actually flesh&blood
themselves?

---

From: Matthew King <automatthew at gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2007 21:12:29 +0000

> "Rob" names. So do the Robinsons. Are they actually flesh&blood

The Robinsons are fleshly:

"Either the Robinsons could not have a child of their own, or were  
unwilling to undertake the travail and expense of a real child."

---

From: Matthew King <automatthew at gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2007 21:13:05 +0000

If I hadn't known the story was by Wolfe, this sentence would have  
revealed it:
?I’m going to pry, Roberta. I’m going to ask you about things that  
are none of my business. I hope you’ll answer.

Secondly, in response to a few of Joel Sieh's observations:

> - Roberta the robot girl pities Robber the robot dog, and through  
> this we get to see her self pity.  At the same time she pities him,  
> she loves him.  Maybe she loves him because he is like her, or  
> because she empathizes with him.  And maybe her understanding is  
> why he loves her (as shown by his attempts to get back to her - I'd  
> like to think it's because she understands and values him, and not  
> just because they're both robots).

I think this exchange is important:
-----
“Robber thinks he’s a real dog. The words held a world of agony.
?Does he?”

?Yes! He’s?he’s a thing, but he thinks he’s a real dog. She turned  
away and ran into her house.

-----

So has the narrator caused Roberta to lose her innocence by leading  
her to  "realize" that she is a thing, not a real girl?  I use the  
scare quotes because Wolfe has consistently shown in his other work  
that one needn't be human to be people.

>
>
> - I think Julianne kills Rover the real dog....  At least that's  
> what the narrator wants us to think, without coming out and saying it.
>
> - Maybe the narrator does, but I don't think so.  There's the  
> repeated hedge imagery when Rover comes into his yard and when the  
> dog dies, but I think it more likely that the narrator is some  
> incarnation of death....  Or something.  His talk at the beginning  
> about the inevitability of death, his fascination with the girls,  
> his attempt at proving the value of living things through his dog- 
> swapping experiment, and his collection of the dead dog at the end  
> lead me in that direction.

I don't believe the dog was dead.  The narrator guessed that Rover  
had followed Julianne home, and when he went there, he "found Rover  
lying quietly" under Julianne's bedroom window.  Rover was pining for  
Julianne, not for the fjords.

The surface story (Roy Lackey's term) seems simple on this point of  
unrequited love.  Robot dog loves robot girl, and flesh dog loves  
flesh girl.  One or both girls do not love their counterpart dogs in  
return.

Julianne tells the narrator that she likes the robot better because  
he "don't mess the carpet".  If Julianne is not dissimulating, this  
supports the narrator's disgust for the sterile civilization.

Perhaps Roberta, in answer to my question above, refuses to love the  
robot dog so as to avoid hard thoughts about her own nature.

Roberta is wrong, though, in thinking that Robber is not a real dog.   
Were he just a thing, Julianne's family would not need to keep him  
chained up.

> As a side note, I thought "penetrated" was an odd word choice in  
> the following sentence: "Roberta's puppy had penetrated the hedge  
> that separates the Robinson's back yard from our own."  With the  
> screaming in the same paragraph, it could take on a violent or  
> sinister quality like what Michael Swanwick says of "A Solar  
> Labyrinth".
>
> - A question that popped out at me while I was reading:  Who is the  
> "our" in the "our own" in the sentence quoted above?
>

And why does the narrator give himself the role of the evil dwarf in  
his imagining of a fecund human past?

---

From: Joel Sieh <joel.sieh at gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2007 21:35:36 +0000

Roberta, Robber, Rover, and the Robinsons all have "Ro" names.  Julianne is
the only exception.  I wonder if there's anything to that?

--Joel

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From: Matthew King <automatthew at gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2007 21:49:06 +0000

On Jun 26, 2007, at 4:35 PM, Joel Sieh wrote:

> Roberta, Robber, Rover, and the Robinsons all have "Ro" names.   
> Julianne is the only exception.  I wonder if there's anything to that?

Perhaps we are supposed to use this pattern to determine the name of  
the narrator.

---

From: Joel Sieh <joel.sieh at gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2007 21:55:54 +0000

And one more note on names: Julianne says her father the chef gave her her
name.  I'm guessing it's a pun on julienne.  "Julienning is a method of food
preparation in which the food item is cut into long thin strips" (source
Wikipedia - Julienning).  Sounds ominous to me!

Another sinister association: Back in that paragraph I mentioned:

"First I seized an opportunity to speak to the girls together. Roberta's
puppy had penetrated the hedge that separates the Robinson's back yard from
our own. Both girls screamed, jumped up and down, and did little else. I
quieted them, assured them that I would capture their small fugitive, and
did so by tempting him with scraps of meat."

The more I look at the paragraph, the worse it looks:  seized, penetrated,
screamed, capture, tempting him with scraps of meat.  Maybe I'm jumping at
shadows here, but it all seems very dark.  It seems nonsensical that the
scraps of meat could be from "Julienne," but it's another strange
connection.

--Joel

On 6/26/07, Joel Sieh <joel.sieh at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Roberta, Robber, Rover, and the Robinsons all have "Ro" names.  Julianne
> is the only exception.  I wonder if there's anything to that?
>
> --Joel
>
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From: Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <danldo at gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2007 22:01:08 +0000

On 6/26/07, Matthew King <automatthew at gmail.com> wrote:
> "I'm going to pry, Roberta. I'm going to ask you about things that
> are none of my business. I hope you'll answer."

Yeah ... that sounds like it could come right out of Silk's mouth,
doesn't it?

> that one needn't be human to be people.

What we have here appears at first glance to be a variation on the
Pinocchio/Astro Boy problem: the robot who wants to be a "real boy," or,
in this case, girl. Roberta is, as you say, "people," and at the story's
beginning it has not even occurred to her that she might not be.

This tells us a few things (in the manner of science fiction) about the
culture in which she lives, the most important of which is that most
people in this culture accept robots as "people." She has been going
to school and does not appear to have been in any way singled out
or mistreated for her "different"-ness; she plays with flesh children
with nobody thinking anything bad or odd about it.

This is key. Robots are *totally* integrated into this human society.

Yet our narrator has a problem with that. He seems to function in the
society, but he hates it, hates what he perceives as its neat, orderly,
artificial nature, and especially its sterility.

-----
Our gently curving streets offended me. Our neatly finished green
lawns, more than half of them of artificial grass, offended me still more.
I hated every house I saw; their fresh paint and absurd mixture of
styles were more than sufficient to account for any amount of hatred.

Yet I had another, better, reason. I hated then because there was
scarcely one that housed two children, and that most housed none.

Like my own.
-----

The first question to pose here: Is his society really this sterile, or is
he projecting his own sterility onto it? The three words that convey
his own childlessness get a paragraph to themselves. They are
important to him.

This leads to a second: Is he human? If robots this integrated into
society, he might not think to mention it; yet, if he feels the way he
seems to, one would hardly think he would fail to mention it.

(Incidentally, why are we all saying "he" and "him"? Is the narrator's
gender ever mentioned?)

And the next paragraphs feed on this ambiguity:

-----
My kind had built a paradise, of which I was a part. A paradise for
machines, in which the human race, though welcome, could not and
did not thrive. In and around the filthy huts of the medieval peasants,
children ran and shouted, laughed and wept, and no doubt received
sturdy buffets when they made too much noise. There the family
sang around a table we would scorn. There grandmothers recounted
wild tales before the fire, tales full of bold boys who made good and
honest country maidens who tricked evil dwarves like me.

Tales that were full of life because the children were, and full of
death, too, because each child had to learn that death is life's
shadow.

Here?But I have gone on too long already.
-----

How very odd: the narrator speaks of "my kind," but as far as these
paragraphs suggest, the narrator's "kind" could as easily be the
machines as the humans.

I am reminded a bit of Isaac Asimov's story, "Segregationist," a story
about a surgeon who is opposed to the practice of putting machine
parts into human bodies. The "shock ending" reveals that the surgeon
is, himself, a robot (a fact important in the context of Asimov's robot
stories, in which robots very much reflected the position of Blacks
in mid-20th-century America).

Children full of life, and full of death: where is this going? And what
did the narrator stop him/herself from saying?

> I don't believe the dog was dead.

Nor do I. The narrator picks "him," not "it" up, and carries "him" home.
In a story that focuses (in part) on the relation between the living and
the non-living the choice of pronoun matters.

> > "our" in the "our own" in the sentence quoted above?

An excellent question. The narrator does not at any other point mention
any companions -- unless it is the "we" who would "scorn" the
medieval peasants' tables.

> And why does the narrator give himself the role of the
> evil dwarf in his imagining of a fecund human past?

Because he has contributed to the corruption of an "honest country
maiden," perhaps. And perhaps, like Rumplestiltskin, all would be
resolved if we could guess his name. (Pleased to meet you ...)

We are clearly intended to set up parallels and oppositions
between the girls and the pups, leading to questions about
Julianne's parents(!), and about how all four relate to the
narrator. I find this detail telling. The narrator says that Rover
was

-----
innocent as are the young of almost every animal, and
friendly as are the young of a very few.
-----

The word "animal" takes on additional resonances if we try
on the position that the narrator is a robot, does it not?

---

From: Daniel D Jones <ddjones at riddlemaster.org>
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2007 23:29:34 +0000

> his imagining of a fecund human past?

The one that popped out at me is whether the narrator is robot or human.  Has 
he, perhaps, managed to infect Roberta with his own disgust at his own 
nature? 

"...Either the Robinsons could not have a child of their own, or were 
unwilling to undertake the travail and expense of a real child. I could not?I 
do not blame them in the least. But I wondered, because I have never had much 
to do with such “bots, about her schooling..."  What's the significance of 
the word "such" in that sentence”  Has he, perhaps, had "much to do" with 
other types of 'bots?  

"My kind had built a paradise, of which I was a part. A paradise for machines, 
in which the human race, though welcome, could not and did not thrive..."  
What is his kind?  Did machines build the paradise?  Is he part of he 
paradise for machines because he's a machine himself?  When he speaks of the 
human race not thriving, is he speaking as a member of that race - or as an 
observer outside the race?

Why is Roberta, the robot girl, the center of the story rather than Julianne, 
the human girl?  Early in the story, he says "...poor simple little beings 
whose torment I began...."  Who's he referring to here?  The two girls?  Or 
the two robots, one in human form, one in canine?

---

From: Matthew King <automatthew at gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2007 01:16:09 +0000

> Yeah ... that sounds like it could come right out of Silk's mouth,

Or Able, or the father from "Ziggurat", or Latro on his better days.   
If I'm remembering rightly, the protagonist of Memorare also spoke  
like that.

---

From: don doggett <kingwukong at yahoo.com>
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2007 04:05:16 +0000

> unwilling to undertake the travail and expense of a

Not necessarily. Wolfe's best trick is to make us make
assumptions. The only statement of fact in the
sentence is that the Robinsons don't have "real"
children. It's suspiciously vague in the face of this
Ro- pattern of the names. Even undertaking the travail
and expense of a real child has no concrete meaning.
Birthing a child? Procuring a child? Cloning one? All
of these could be an expensive ordeal. 

Don

The Evangelists: a Lesser Apocrypha                                                                        http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=178109961

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From: don doggett <kingwukong at yahoo.com>
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2007 04:15:58 +0000

> his imagining of a fecund human past?

Maybe this is reaching on my part, but Herman Hesse
wrote a story about a hideous dwarf who belonged to a
princess. He's given a puppy that he loves more than
anything, but the princess'
jackass husband drowns it. So the dwarf gets revenge
by poisoning the prince and himself, leaving the
princess alone iirc. What this might have to do with
the story, I'm not sure. It also seems to have
reflections of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
where everyone is a replicant, but not everyone knows
it.

Don

       
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Building a website is a piece of cake. Yahoo! Small Business gives you all the tools to get online.
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---

From: don doggett <kingwukong at yahoo.com>
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2007 05:34:21 +0000

Okay,
 
I may crash and burn with this, but be darned if I'm
not going to try to fly.

First. You don't cook a salad. You prepare it. And if
you're a cook rather than a chef, you don't specialise
in salads. And the money won't be that great. 

This is from the Word Detective (google that and
"cook"):

 {Our everyday "prepare food" verb "to cook" first
appeared in the 14th century and is derived from the
much older noun form, which comes from the Latin
"coquus," which also gave us "concoct." As might be
expected from an activity so central to human life,
"to cook" has spawned a variety of slang and
colloquial senses over the years, including "to ruin"
and,      alternatively, "to do very well" (as in "to
cook with gas"). "To cook"      meaning "to falsify,
tamper with, present in a secretly altered form" is
actually one of the oldest slang senses of the verb,
dating all the way back to at least the early 17th
century, and is directly drawn from the "prepare
carefully" sense of "cook."}

Okay, so what is salad? Well a salad, in addition to
being a food, can also simply mean a "variety of
things". BUT. . . another word for salad is sallet,
which is also a helmet with eyeslits from the middle
ages.

So, I think that Julianne's dad is some sort of
biomechanical engineer that specializes in sallets:
brain pans and such. And Julianne is literally made
from strips of meat. Either a clone or a Jonas type
hybrid. But she's as artificial as Roberta.

Don

 
____________________________________________________________________________________
Looking for earth-friendly autos? 
Browse Top Cars by "Green Rating" at Yahoo! Autos' Green Center.
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---

From: Mo Holkar / UKG <lists at ukg.co.uk>
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2007 09:28:23 +0000

At 05:15 27/06/2007, Don wrote:
>Maybe this is reaching on my part, but Herman Hesse wrote a story 
>about a hideous dwarf who belonged to a princess. He's given a puppy 
>that he loves more than anything, but the princess' jackass husband drowns it.

A more familiar reference might be to Rumpelstiltskin, who spins 
straw into gold for the miller's daughter in exchange for (he hopes) 
her first-born child.

I'm also picking up references to Don Juan -- the great hand which 
drags people down to Hell, and the quotation from Byron about his dog?

The epigraph is from Shakespeare's 144th sonnet:

Two loves I have of comfort and despair,
Which like two spirits do suggest me still:
The better angel is a man right fair,
The worser spirit a woman coloured ill.
To win me soon to hell, my female evil,
Tempteth my better angel from my side,
And would corrupt my saint to be a devil,
Wooing his purity with her foul pride.
And whether that my angel be turned fiend,
Suspect I may, yet not directly tell;
But being both from me, both to each friend,
I guess one angel in another's hell:
Yet this shall I ne'er know, but live in doubt,
Till my bad angel fire my good one out.

although what to make of that, I don't know. Possibly also a 
reference to Lord Alfred Douglas's "Two Loves", one of which famously 
dare not speak its name?

I'm not sure why the narrator implores God to forgive him for taking 
Rover back to Roberta. Julianne has already said that she didn't want 
Rover, so it's not like he could have stayed there. Unless the 
narrator thinks that Julianne was lying about this? He's said that he 
was doubtful when Roberta said that both girls called the deal off.

Mo

---

From: Solomon, Joshua <j.a.solomon at city.ac.uk>
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2007 09:46:43 +0000

> Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2007 17:35:36 -0400
> From: "Joel Sieh" <joel.sieh at gmail.com>
> 

Yeah. I'm pretty sure we're supposed to think about Shakespeare's Romeo. And
Julianne is like Juliet.

> Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2007 15:01:08 -0700
> From: "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes" <danldo at gmail.com>
> 

Me too. Again, I think we are supposed to draw a parallel between racial
segregation and robot/human segregation. Note the exchange
"What do you get if you mix black and white?"
"Grey if you mean paint. Brown if you mean people."

bee
-- 
Joshua A. Solomon
http://www.staff.city.ac.uk/~solomon

---

From: Nigel Price <nigelprice at onetel.net>
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2007 09:56:02 +0000

I think it's a really good short short-story. As already pointed out, there
seems to be a distinct possibility that the narrator is him-, her- or itself
a robot. The situation on "his" world is paradoxical. It is sterile because
humans have opted for the mechanical rather than the biological, but
introducing segregation between humans and machines turns out not to be the
answer to solving the problem. It introduces pain and sorrow without solving
the preference. This seems to be in part because the dogs retain a natural
preference for their own kind which humans have lost. The girls, in
contrast, prefer their opposites. The robot girl is made miserable by the
way the robot dog shows her her own lack of humanness while the human girl
and her family are burdened by the biological inconveniences of a real dog.

It's a sad little tale, but brilliantly told and full of unexplainedly
sinister notes and references. The narrator has from the start a slightly
devilish quality that isn't quite substantiated by the apparent facts of the
story. He begins with references to devils hauling sinners off to hell and
acts and speaks throughout like a stalker or a paedophile, though nothing
that he does actually justifies this impression. He's interfering and
unwise, that's all. But maybe that's enough, and maybe that's the - or a -
point of the story. If you're miserable and disatisfied, it's easy to spread
your unhappiness to others. The narrator lives, by his own description, in a
machine paradise and he's the snake in the garden introducing machine
unhappiness.

Maybe he really is a robot Satan, or at least a robot Satan analogue?

Nigel

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From: Joel Sieh <joel.sieh at gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2007 15:14:07 +0000

> did the narrator stop him/herself from saying?

I just looked back at this part.  My best guess is that he stops himself
from further contrasting the current time with the past.  He begins the
sentence with "Here," which I figure means, "Here, now."  I'll take a stab
at finishing the sentence: "Here, life and death are both shunned, as they
are unnecessary burdens on a culture too perfect to allow either."

> the non-living the choice of pronoun matters.

Yeah, I think I misread this part.  My misread might point out an ambiguity
that can allow a different reading, however.  I'm not really going to pursue
the alternate reading here, but I want to explain why I came to my original
conclusion, and why the ambiguity might exist.

Here's the relevant part of the story:

"I got Julianne's address from Roberta, drove over there, and found Rover
lying quietly by the side of the house, half hidden by shrubbery, under a
window that I would guess was that of Julianne's bedroom.

God forgive me! I picked him up and carried him home."
The part that first made me jump to my dead dog conclusion was "lying
quietly by the side of the house, half hidden by shrubbery."  It seemed odd
to me that the dog would be half hidden by the shrubbery, unless he was
dead.  He would either be "hiding in the shrubbery," or the shrubbery would
not be mentioned.  "Lying quietly by the side of the house" made him look
like a discarded thing, and is similar to a dog "lying quietly by the side
of the road," which anyone could read as a dead dog.  The "God forgive me!"
line reinforced this, because carrying a dead dog home would be jarring to
the family, and could seem callous, and ... odd.  Lastly, Rover was not
mentioned again after this paragraph.

Of course, there are clearly other valid reasons why this idea is wrong.
However, I found it fun to think about.

--Joel

P. S. -- I think that the list has figured most of this story out.  I've
enjoyed the interpretations I've seen presented.
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