# Fallible Narrators and Even More Fallible Copyists: a Textual Con sideration of the "Book of Silk" (a tangent) *The Whorl list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 11 Jun 2001* > 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. --- ### Alex David Groce *11 Jun 2001, 13:39* > Nutria wrote: > FWIW, this is exactly and precisely what Roman Catholic James > Blish does in his classic *A Case of Conscience.* Wolfe shares > Blish's Thomism. Blish provides both a "nature" version of the > story, and a "grace" version of the story, and only the "eye of > faith" can see which version is the more "ultimate" explanation of > events. It would not surprise me if Wolfe, who certainly knows > Blish's work, would do the same thing. Blish was Catholic? Somehow I'd gotten the impression he was, at some point, an atheist and at another point (I forget the ordering) an Anglican, and that heresies and theology were to a large extent more a hobby to him than a matter of faith. Was I off-base? Google doesn't quickly confirm either hypothesis for me. ``` "And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." John 8:32 -- Alex David Groce (agroce+ at cs.cmu.edu) Ph.D. Student, Carnegie Mellon University - Computer Science Department 8112 Wean Hall (412)-268-3066 http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~agroce *This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun. ``` ---