{ "export": { "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/5419", "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": 5419, "subject": "Greenhourse Effect (was Rajan and Food)", "messages": 1, "voices": 1, "first": "2009-04-29T15:40:49+00:00", "last": "2009-04-29T15:40:49+00:00" }, "messages": [ { "message_id": "<000001c9c8e0$e01371d0$a03a5570$@com>", "from": { "name": "Brian Lovely", "address": "brian at studiobl.com" }, "date": "2009-04-29T15:40:49+00:00", "subject": "(urth) Greenhourse Effect (was Rajan and Food)", "in_reply_to": null, "reply_link": null, "blocks": [ { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "I'm with ya about it being a stretch from polyploidy to multiple limbs.\nStill, with alien biologies....\n\nHas anyone ever had any solid theories about the greenhouses? Seawrack says\nshe's seen similar things on the ocean floor, so the one with the broken\ndome that she and Horn find may have been pushed up by volcanic action at\nsome point. Plus one of Horn's sons looks through one of the rings\nassociated with the Neighbors (can't remember which one) and sees a Neighbor\nsitting on a tree sticking up out of the ocean. Is this somehow a vision of\nNeighbors crossbreeding themselves into dryads in underwater domes? Inhumi\nbreed and lay their eggs in the water, but can they survive in salt water?\nMaybe the domes are the only place proof against the Inhumi. \n\nA theme in the books is about growth through change, and often that change\ncomes about through physical hybridization (even just the consuming of\nblood...the blood IS the life, you know), or imitation. I guess the process\nwould be a sustained effort at close imitation actually triggers a change to\nbecome more like the model. The gods of the Whorl are capable of becoming\ndivine over time. The Inhumi are capable of becoming human over time.\nHumans are capable of...\n\nI don't think the Neighbors have gone to another whorl circling another sun,\nas Horn thinks (or was it SilkHorn, or Rajan, or Incanto?). I think they've\ngone into the \"spaces between\" to use a Lovecraftian term. If they're\nsomeplace physical, they're in the trees or in the undersea domes. However\nI think the undersea domes have something to do with an alteration performed\non someone by someone. Maybe the Neighbors performed it on themselves to\nmake themselves less susceptible to the Inhumi. Perhaps they're in the\ntrees as dryads now because of some modification performed on themselves in\nthe domes. Or they were treelike and/or dryadic before and the modification\nwas to allow themselves to survive away from the trees.\n\nDoes anyone have any theories about what the greenhouses are for?\n\n\n\n-----Original Message-----\nFrom: urth-bounces at lists.urth.net [mailto:urth-bounces at lists.urth.net] On\nBehalf Of urth-request at lists.urth.net\nSent: Tuesday, April 28, 2009 11:40 PM\nTo: urth at lists.urth.net\nSubject: Urth Digest, Vol 56, Issue 59\n\nSend Urth mailing list submissions to\n\turth at lists.urth.net\n\nTo subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit\n\thttp://lists.urth.net/listinfo.cgi/urth-urth.net\nor, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to\n\turth-request at lists.urth.net\n\nYou can reach the person managing the list at\n\turth-owner at lists.urth.net\n\nWhen replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific\nthan \"Re: Contents of Urth digest...\"\n\n\nToday's Topics:\n\n 1. Re: Urth Digest, Vol 56, Issue 58 (Robin Dunn)\n 2. Rajan and Food (Brian Lovely)\n 3. Re: Rajan and Food (David Stockhoff)\n 4. Re: Rajan and Food (Matthew Groves)\n 5. Re: Rajan and Food (Jerry Friedman)\n 6. Re: Rajan and Food (Matthew Groves)" }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "----------------------------------------------------------------------\n\nMessage: 1\nDate: Tue, 28 Apr 2009 14:19:22 -0700\nFrom: Robin Dunn \nSubject: Re: (urth) Urth Digest, Vol 56, Issue 58\nTo: urth at lists.urth.net\nMessage-ID:\n\t\nContent-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1\n\nFascinating discussion of the moral parts the Neighbors play vis a vis\nhuman settlement on Blue--\n\nOne thought I had is that it can be counterproductive to some extent\nto expect that every creature we find in Wolfe fits into a detailed\nbestiary that he had planned.\n\nSeverian narrates at some point in Thrax that he rarely reads tales\nwhere strangers are encountered, no dialogue results, but some\nnameless hatred is still there between men. As I recall Severian has\nthis thought when he passes some guy that glares at him, without any\nexplanation.\n\nPart of what I always liked about Wolfe is that he's willing to have\nso many loose ends, and he's willing to introduce incredibly complex\nideas and characters almost as side-gags, before moving on to\nsomething completely different.\n\nI guess what I'm saying is, sometimes the crazy shit goes down, and we\nstay in the dark ;)\n\n\n\nOn Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 2:09 PM, wrote:\nSend Urth mailing list submissions to\n? ? ? ?urth at lists.urth.net\n\nTo subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit\n? ? ? ?http://lists.urth.net/listinfo.cgi/urth-urth.net\nor, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to\n? ? ? ?urth-request at lists.urth.net\n\nYou can reach the person managing the list at\n? ? ? ?urth-owner at lists.urth.net\n\nWhen replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific\nthan \"Re: Contents of Urth digest...\"\n\n\nToday's Topics:\n\n? 1. ?Rajan and Food (Brian Lovely)\n? 2. Re: ?Rajan and Food (James Wynn)\n? 3. Re: ?Rajan and Food (Jordon Flato)\n? 4. Re: ?Rajan and Food (Jordon Flato)\n\n\n----------------------------------------------------------------------\n\nMessage: 1\nDate: Tue, 28 Apr 2009 06:58:32 -0400\nFrom: \"Brian Lovely\" \nSubject: (urth) Rajan and Food\nTo: \nMessage-ID: <011001c9c7f0$465a20c0$d30e6240$@com>\nContent-Type: text/plain; charset=\"us-ascii\"\n\nHe's a tree, he's a tree! Neighbors are trees, Inhumi are parasitic vines.\n.or something. ?Not sure what the Neighbor-version of Inhumi are-maybe the\nvine with a face that is cut for Incanto's staff. ?Except that seems so\nquiescent. ?You'd think the Neighbor-Inhumi would be a bit more active.\n?The\nInhumi are somehow about sacrifice and one race raising up another. ?The\nNeighbors infected humans with Inhumi to see what human-Inhumi would be\nlike.not sure where I'm going with this, but there's something here about\nbeing willing to suffer for the betterment of the Inhumi. ?So, a) the\ncrossbreed would be a \"higher\" being than the pure Inhumi, and b) you'd\nrid\nyourself of them by being so passive.they'd take on your Christ-like\nwillingness to sacrifice yourself.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\"James Wynn\" crushtv at gmail.com wrote:\n\n\n\nGranted, but when it is combined with the onset of ravenous hunger in the\nSpring, we know more is going on here (incidentally, this is more of that\nTree-Neighbor connection that I still don't understand). I do not recall\nan\ninstance of LS Silk pretending to eat food set before him. He fasts, but\nwhen there is not a lot of food available anyway, it is easy to be holy in\nthat way. Not the same thing as what happens in SS, I think.\n\n\n\n\n\n--Brian Lovely\n\n-------------- next part --------------\nAn HTML attachment was scrubbed...\nURL:\n\n\n------------------------------\n\nMessage: 2\nDate: Tue, 28 Apr 2009 07:04:11 -0500\nFrom: \"James Wynn\" \nSubject: Re: (urth) Rajan and Food\nTo: \"The Urth Mailing List\" \nMessage-ID: \nContent-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset=\"iso-8859-1\";\n? ? ? ?reply-type=original" }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 2, "text": "He's a tree, he's a tree! Neighbors are trees,\nInhumi are parasitic vines. ?.or something.\nNot sure what the Neighbor-version of Inhumi\nare-maybe the vine with a face that is cut for Incanto's staff." }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "Brian, let's posit that the Neighbors are dryads--that their steady\nphysical\nform is one of the \"sleepy trees\" in the forests of Blue. How do the\ninhumi\nmake the jump to become vines? Or how do they transform back to\nwinged/clawed vampiric reptiles? That is the fundamental problem with any\n\"tree/vine theory\" regarding the Neighbors and inhumi.\n\nJ.\n\n\n\n------------------------------\n\nMessage: 3\nDate: Tue, 28 Apr 2009 11:00:10 -0700\nFrom: Jordon Flato \nSubject: Re: (urth) Rajan and Food\nTo: The Urth Mailing List \nMessage-ID:\n? ? ? ?<273409710904281100p29971f87s893b7b7aff2a2e5b at mail.gmail.com>\nContent-Type: text/plain; charset=\"iso-8859-1\"\n\nI've wondered if the strange creature (not the leatherskin) that jumps on\nthe ship with Horn when he first sets out, which is described much like a\nneighbor but faaaar scarier isn't maybe a nieghbor/inhumi remnant. ?That\nis\nwhat occurred to me.\n\nI can't get behind the neighbors as trees/inhumi as vines theory at all.\n?It\nseems like such a stretch. ?There is no denying a connection of some sort\nbetween trees and neighbors. ?I'm not certain it is a literal connection.\nIn New Sun, there are instances of Wolfe anthropomorphising trees and\nsuch.\nWith human qualities. ?Why wouldn't the same be true on another planet,\nbut\nechoing the essense of the 'original' inhabitants, the neighbors.\n\nAnd I think, in terms of the Neighbors infecting the inhumi on the Whorl,\nit\nwas primarily to get a sense of what the souls of the humans were like.\nWhen they saw the result, they made their deciscion that they could give\nthe\nworld to Humans, as they had confidence that the humans would have a\nchance,\nthat the neighbors did not, to end the cycle of inhumi/host extinction,\ndue\nto the possible quailities of the human soul. “I think, in Horn/Silk in\nparticular (keeping in mind that when the neighbors gave Blue to humans\nthrough Horn, he was still Horn and not Silk at all), they saw something\nin\nhumanity (in my opinion, not his being a neighbor doppleganger) that\nconvinced them that they might be able, at some point, to make a peace\nwith\nthe inhumi. ?They wouldn't have known that if they had not first infected\nthe Whorl with inhumi.\n\nWhat is much more controversial to me is that the neighbors say they also\nspent time on the whorl, and befriended some there. ?What are the\nimplications of this” “Who did they befriend” “We have an inhumi character\nin Long Sun. ?Is there a as yet unidentified Neighbor”\n\nOn Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 5:04 AM, James Wynn wrote:" }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 2, "text": "He's a tree, he's a tree! Neighbors are trees,\nInhumi are parasitic vines. ?.or something." }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 3, "text": "Not sure what the Neighbor-version of Inhumi\nare-maybe the vine with a face that is cut for Incanto's staff." }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 2, "text": "Brian, let's posit that the Neighbors are dryads--that their steady\nphysical form is one of the \"sleepy trees\" in the forests of Blue. How do\nthe inhumi make the jump to become vines? Or how do they transform back\nto\nwinged/clawed vampiric reptiles? That is the fundamental problem with any\n\"tree/vine theory\" regarding the Neighbors and inhumi.\n\nJ.\n_______________________________________________" } ] } ] }