Subject: (whorl) Locally napping Gods

From: m.driussi <m.driussi at genie.com>
Date: Mon, 24 Feb 1997 22:36:00 +0000

[Posted from Whorl, the mailing list for Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun]

Reply:  Item #5061570 from WHORL at LISTS.BEST.COM@INET02#

vizacacha,

Whoops!  You are right, of course.  Since I brought up sleeping, can
I modify "sleeping gods" into, er, "locally napping gods"?  Quetzal
and the Lemuroids do talk about other cities where the rebel gods
brag (and the Lemuroids seem to think that they have Palustria under
their control).  The Lemuroids also appear to have been "expanding"
(becoming immortal, possessing superhuman strength, magical powers, etc.)
to fill the roles left by the locally absent gods, don't you think?
In imitation of Typhon himself, though presumably they don't know
that detail.

Do you have a page citation for Trivs saying that they talk to Sphigx
all the time?  Was that at the dinner party?

(Re: "getting a lander launched from Viron," small point, but the first
lander, the signal that keeps entropy temporarily at bay, was launched
from Mainframe.  The Viron landing party was an
afterthought/afterbirth, mainly because Auk had gotten people so
stirred up.  Well, that and their city was going to hell, what with
Stanislov-method chems both Lemuroid and Triv hamming it up, and petulant
lovers conducting aerial bombardment, etc.)

(FWIW, for me the "Jerboa-childcutter" idea is approaching likelihood,
if not downright certitude.)

Kypris would be hanging around in Viron (i.e., in Hyacinth's shrine)
precisely because it is, as you write, godless.  And as for what Kypris
recognizes in first glance at Silk, maybe we can all agree that she sees
that he is one of the god tools left lying around?  Whether such a tool
is an annonymous frozen embryo or a specific demigod offspring is a level
that we can all agree to disagree on.

Re: THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY, yep, another title that Neil Gaiman
pointed me toward and which I read fairly recently.  Great stuff.
Chock full of crazy details that somehow all work, even as they get wild
and wooly.  (An interesting juxtaposition would be to compare it with A
VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS, since both deal with big scale conspiracy things in a
fantastic manner, but arrive at different conclusions.  I think?)  And
yep, I read THE IRON HEEL too (but in that case I wondered if London
understood the Orwellian paradox involved of having the good guy
rebels using such deplorable means for their noble ends).

=mantis=

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