{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/94",
    "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": 94,
    "subject": "Hues Revisited",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "1997-07-11T14:47:26+00:00",
    "last": "1997-07-11T14:47:26+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0002-0152@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Joel Priddy",
        "address": "jpriddy at saturn.vcu.edu"
      },
      "date": "1997-07-11T14:47:26+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) Hues Revisited",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": " My first impression of \"Hues\" was that it was a sci-fi Antichrist\nstory. When it was brought up on the list and I was thinking back\nto it, pretty much all I could remember about was \"baby space\nSatan.\" But I couldn't figure out what the point of the story\nwas. I expected some moral point to be made, after all, if you're\ngonna get saddled with raising the Antichrist you really ought to\nhave some sort of fatal flaw, right? An innocent getting stuck\nwith that sort of evil seems like the subject of a much longer\nwork.\n  When the pulp-magazine cover imagery was mentioned, I thought\nthat made perfect sense. I could immediately imagine Wolfe using\nas his point of departure some lurid painting of a shocked man\nand woman with their pet bird and robot staring into some energy\nfield from which a demon was emerging. I bet that if we looked,\nwe could find dozens of covers that depicted almost that exact\nscene.\n\n   Upon re-reading the story, I think if there is a fatal flaw or\nsin shared by the characters, it's idolatry. Kyle states that he\nworships life. From the last line of the story, it seems that\nMarilyn does also, even if she might not say it as directly as\nKyle did. One might say that worship of life is worshipping the\nvisible face of the Divine. If you believe in a literal Hell, and\nif through the lens of science fiction you propose a physical\nexistence to Hell, it is necessary to believe that some Life is\ninherently evil. Not realizing this in time is what dooms the\ncrew.\nHere's a thought: we often see Wolfe deal with the Divine in a\nscience fiction setting, but rarely with the Infernal. This is\nsort of a turn-around from most entertainment, as alga can\nattest, where the demonic is usually considered more interesting.\nThe unpleasantness in Wolfe's worlds comes from the Fallen state\nof the world's inhabitants, not an outside metaphysical force.\nTyphon is not the anti-Outsider. Even Erebus and Abia don't\nstrike me as being stand-ins for Satan (although I could be\nwrong. I read them as just having very different goals from\nhumanity... being adversaries, not The Adversary).\n\n A word of the Antichrist/anti-Messiah distinction: Hasn't the\nCatholic church declared people to be antichrists over the years?\nReally out-of-line popes, and people like that? I think the term\npretty much applies to anyone whose goals are the opposite of\nChrist's. Thanks to the whole sub-genre of horror movies that\nfollowed Rosemary, I think it's well-established to think of a\ndemonically possessed unborn baby as the/a antichrist.\n\nMy favorite line from this story is Kyle's response to Skips\nquestion \"Do you have a soul?\":\n\n\"...I've seen a printout, though of course I didn't read it all;\nit was very long.\"\n\ncephalothorax, the dandruff shampoo"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}