Subject: (urth) Re: Digest urth.v002.n020

From: Alice Turner <al at interport.net>
Date: Sat, 12 Jul 1997 10:46:28 +0000

[Posted from URTH, a mailing list about Gene Wolfe's New Sun and other works]

cephalo-

I'm inclined not to blame the starship crew at all, or to look for a flaw
or sin. After all, if you go along with the old dicta, you'll note that
wickedness preys on innocence. Faust preys on Gretchen, the coven on
Rosemary, Satan not on a wicked witch but on a virgin to bear the
Antichrist. Expedience is all, and part of the thrill for the audience is
what cynical TV producers call WomJep, the hoary formula of placing a woman
in mortal jeopardy.

Although you could say that they have committed the PC crime of kidnapping
a creature from its natural habitat, and therefore deserve what's coming.

> The unpleasantness in Wolfe's worlds comes from the Fallen state
> of the world's inhabitants, not an outside metaphysical force.
> Typhon is not the anti-Outsider. Even Erebus and Abia don't
> strike me as being stand-ins for Satan (although I could be
> wrong. I read them as just having very different goals from
> humanity... being adversaries, not The Adversary).

That's interestingly put, and I think you're right. But you're talking
about long and thoughtful works, whereas "Hues" is...well, I think "pulp"
covers it. Let's see what he does with the inhumi. Already, we have found
one of them to have an extremely complex character, but he may not be at
all representative.

>  A word of the Antichrist/anti-Messiah distinction: Hasn't the
> Catholic church declared people to be antichrists over the years?
> Really out-of-line popes, and people like that? I think the term
> pretty much applies to anyone whose goals are the opposite of
> Christ's. Thanks to the whole sub-genre of horror movies that
> followed Rosemary, I think it's well-established to think of a
> demonically possessed unborn baby as the/a antichrist.

I think you're probably thinking of the Reformation's tack that all
popes---the papacy itself---represented the antichrist. Printing was well
established by that time (the internet of its day!) and hundreds of
monographs, cartoons and drawings----scurrilous, obscene and frequently
coarsely funny---to that effect were circulated all over Protestant-leaning
Europe. Islam was not attacked the same way; the antichrist is always
understood to arise within Christianity. The horror movies, no matter how
debased, follow the tradition.

> My favorite line from this story is Kyle's response to Skips
> question "Do you have a soul?":
> 
> "...I've seen a printout, though of course I didn't read it all;
> it was very long."

That wonderful exchange almost makes the story worthwhile!

-alga-

---

From: Ron Crown, St. Louis University <crownrw at slu.edu>
Date: Sun, 13 Jul 1997 14:02:55 +0000

> FWIW, "All the Hues of Hell" (1987) reminds me a great deal of three
> other Wolfe starship tales: "Alien Stones" (1972), "Silhouette" (1975),
> and "The Other Dead Man" (1988).

Mantis, would you mind expanding on this a little bit?  "Alien Stones"
strikes me as more genuinely hard sf than is usual for Wolfe (and would
fit more appropriately, IMHO, in _The Ascent of Wonder" than either
"Hues" or "Procreation."  As I see it, "Stones" is Wolfe's version of a
Big Dumb Object story, some of the secrets of which are discovered by
the grizzled space captain by the application of observation and logic
(ironically contrasted with the inability of the young "empath" to figure
out what is going on).  There is a typical Wolfe riff on human/machine
identity (is Daw or Wad the computer simulation?) but the fact that I
wasn't sure which was which didn't interfere with my ability to enjoy the
story.

"Dead Man" is the Wolfe identity conundrum, ghost-story-in-outer-space
version and "Silhouette" I confess not to fully understand.  (are the
silhouettes aliens or imaginary?  How does the protagonist figure out
that the captain is the leader of the mutiny, or is he?  Why do all the 
characters have Germanic names?, etc. etc. etc)  Any thoughts?

> Christ's. 

What you say is absolutely true and underscores the distinction I want to
make between "antichrist" and some type of demonic or supernatural being.
Most, if not all "antichrists" in history from the king of Babylon to
Saddam Hussein (hey, how's that for closing the circle!) have been human
beings.  True, they were seen as "demonic" (but note the use of
quotations).  In "Hues," we're clearly dealing with some type of
otherworldly being and _that's_ why I was opposed to the antichrist
motif.  Just call me pedantic :).

Here's something interesting (and even somewhat relevant to the topic).
The name "Lucifer" first appears in the Bible as a translation of the
Greek "phosphoros" (they both mean "bearer of light"), which was in turn
a translation of the Hebrew helel meaning "bright shiner."  It's used in
the book of Isaiah re the king of Babylon (not the devil).  The passage
uses an
astronomically-based myth of the (failed) attempt of Venus in its morning
star version to usurp the throne, as it were, of the sun.  As Venus is to
the sun, so the king of Babylon is to Yahweh.  

Now, do you know what the Aztecs called Venus?  Quetzalcoatl!  And now
back to WHORL....

Ron Crown
crownrw at slu.edu