{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/6583",
    "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'"
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  "archive": "urth",
  "thread": {
    "id": 6583,
    "subject": "This Week in Google Alerts: Armstrong",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "2014-07-28T15:24:46+00:00",
    "last": "2014-07-28T15:24:46+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<CAMwO0gy44brimWmDn4s04RfhCBwrAFGAAiMJ562J93R4ihxVAA@mail.gmail.com>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Gwern Branwen",
        "address": "gwern at gwern.net"
      },
      "date": "2014-07-28T15:24:46+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) This Week in Google Alerts: Armstrong",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "- long TR interview already excerpted in separate thread:\nhttp://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/2014-July/054936.html\n- http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/headline/2014/07/23/9bc1790e-061b-11e4-bbf1-cc51275e7f8f_story.html\nbook review, \"_Neil Armstrong: A Life of Flight_ by Jay Barbree\", Lee\nBillings:"
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "At one point in Gene Wolfe’s _Book of the New Sun_, a story set\non a far-future Earth lapsed into a Dark Age, the narrator glimpses a\n“warrior of a dead world” in an enigmatic picture hanging in a dusty\ngallery. Clad in bulky white armor and a bubble-like helmet of\npolished gold, standing beside a stiff banner in a desolate gray\nwasteland, the “warrior” is actually an Apollo astronaut planting an\nAmerican flag on the moon. For most of the inhabitants of Wolfe’s\nfallen world, the moon landings and the people who made them had\nbecome little more than a half-remembered fairy tale.\n\nI recalled Wolfe’s scene while reading one of the final\nanecdotes in Jay Barbree’s admirably accessible new book, a biography\nof Neil Armstrong, who died at age 82 in 2012. At the conclusion of a\nglobal tour promoting space exploration, Armstrong, the first man on\nthe moon, sits in a roadside diner with Gene Cernan, the last,\nchatting over coffee about when humans might at last return to the\nlunar surface, and how we might someday visit Mars. More than 40 years\nago, their Apollo missions had captivated billions, but now Armstrong\nand Cernan were retired and relatively anonymous, pining for a future\nthat had never fully arrived.\n\nLike most people Armstrong and Cernan now encountered, the\nserver refilling their cups had no idea that his customers were living\nbookends to what, even now, is our modern era’s most astounding\nadventure. Yet unlike in Wolfe’s tale, the moonwalkers? fade to\nnear-myth has happened not over countless millennia, but in less than\na half-century. Somehow, as Apollo and its astronauts have aged, its\nlegacy has been perversely twisted, with human interplanetary voyaging\nnow routinely depicted as just an old-fashioned eccentricity of the"
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Cold War rather than the existential imperative it truly is. ...\n- http://apilgriminnarnia.com/2014/07/23/sham/ \"The Sea a Sham Born of\nUniformity: On Subverting the Normal with Gene Wolfe\n(#WritingWednesdays)\":"
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "From a writer’s perspective and Wolfe’s story really is a kind\nof narrative writer’s workshop we can learn from his ability to\ndisorient the reader. One can do that easily enough through strangers,\ndreams, foreign lands, or other dimensional realities; there are some\nbrilliant examples of these in all of the best fantasy books. But\nWolfe takes it a step further. He not only enhances the texture of his\nworld by having readers discover its idiosyncrasies, but he also\ndisorients the reader by having her discover mundane realities in her\nworld in new and surprising ways.\n\nThe following excerpt is a great example of this subversion of\nthe normal. The protagonist falls asleep beside a giant. In his sleep\nhe mounts a leather-winged beast and explores the dying globe that he\nhas been forced to wander. Watch the way that Wolfe inverts our\nexpectations, speaking of the vision ahead as a “sham of uniformity”"
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "and a “purple waste.” The Shadow of the Torturer is a narrative\nreprimand to the writer prone to info dump, as well as a template for\nthe double inversion of the reader’s expectation in entering the\nspeculative universe:"
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "_The Shadow of the Torturer_, \"Chapter 15: Baldanders\": \"And\nthen I dreamed?."
        },
        {
          "kind": "sig",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "gwern\nhttp://www.gwern.net"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}