{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/698",
    "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": 698,
    "subject": "Liev's Postpostulate; A Story",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "1998-06-01T15:22:40+00:00",
    "last": "1998-06-01T15:22:40+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0012-0038@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "adam louis stephanides",
        "address": "astephan at students.uiuc.edu"
      },
      "date": "1998-06-01T15:22:40+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) Liev's Postpostulate; A Story",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "I just finished rereading _The Fifth Head of Cerberus_, so the recent turn\nof the list's collective mind towards that topic is timely for me.  In\naddition to the comments I've posted, I have a couple of questions.\n\n1) V.R.T. in prison writes:\n\n        She believed, though she pretended not to, that the Annese have\n     devoured and replaced homo sapiens -- Veil's Hypothesis, and she is\n     Veil; it has been used for years to discredit other heterodox\n     theories about the original population of Sainte Anne.  But who,\n     then, _Tante Jeannine_, are the Free People?  Conservatives who\n     would not desert the old ways?  The question is not, as I once\n     thought, how much the thoughts of the Shadow children influence\n     reality; but how much our own do.  I have read the interview with\n     Mrs. Blount -- a hundred times while I was in the hills -- and I\n     know who I believe the Free People to be: I call it Liev's\n     Postpostulate.  I am Liev and I have left. (254-5 in the Ace edition)\n\nWhat is Liev's Postpostulate?  (Note that V.R.T. appears to reject Veil's\nHyposthesis.)   The fact that \"Liev\" is \"Veil\" spelled backwards suggests,\nof course, that V.R.T. believes the Free People are homo sapiens who have\ngone native.  There's a bit of evidence for this in his quote of Dollo's\nLaw, which states that \"An organ which degenerates during evolution never\nreacquires its original size, and an organ which disappears never\nreappears; if the offspring return to a mode of life in which the\nvestigial organ had an important function, the organ does not return to\nthe original state, but the organism develops a substitute\" (231)\nimmediately after his explanation that he holds a pen badly because he is\nunable to write at all when he holds it correctly.  This juxtaposition\ncould imply that V.R.T. believes himself descended from ancestors who\ncould hold pens correctly; i.e. humans.  Of course, this doesn't explain\nhow the Annese all got green eyes.  Nor does it explain how they became\nshape-shifters, unless the French Lamarckially evolved the ability to\nescape their persecutors.  Or possibly the Annese can't shape-shift at\nall, aside from the ability of changing one's face V.R.T. attributes to\nhis mother and himself, which acting skill might account for.\n\nA more radical possibility, suggested by the sentence about our thoughts\ninfluencing reality, is the V.R.T. believes the Annese to be materialized\nprojections of the colonists' thoughts, as the Old Wise One in \"A Story\"\nwas a projection of the other Shadow children.  Either way, I don't know\nhow Mrs. Blount's story ties in, except for suggesting a tie between the\nAnnese and the French.\n\n2)  What is the significance of the second novelette, \"A Story\"?  I\nrealize that it was written by V.R.T., probably in prison, but what is its\nfunction in the novel?  In particular, what is meant by the portrayal of\nthe Shadow children, with their drug use, their strange naming customs,\nand their embodied \"Group Norm\"?  (Not to mention that that the last\nShadow child in the pit, who calls down the Earthmen, gives his name as\n\"Wolf\"!)  A full explication of \"A Story\" might reveal what \"Liev's\nPostpostulate\" is, or vice versa; but as yet it's not clear to me.\n\n--Adam"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}