{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/whorl/342",
    "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": "whorl",
  "thread": {
    "id": 342,
    "subject": "Horn's narrative biases",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "1997-06-13T09:21:00+00:00",
    "last": "1997-06-13T09:21:00+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<whorl-v0006-0346@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "David Wells",
        "address": "adw at ovum.com"
      },
      "date": "1997-06-13T09:21:00+00:00",
      "subject": "(whorl) Horn's narrative biases",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "Mantis wrote:\nRe: Hyacinth as a nasty fighter when she needs to be.\nFact is, she's just plain nasty whenever Silk isn't looking!"
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Says Horn, of course. Who, I would submit, is a particularly unreliable\nwitness in this case. All kinds of complicated sexual jealousy might be\nlikely to spring up between a horny (:-|) young man, his hero\nfigure and an older woman, his hero's lover and possessed of\nsupernormal/supernatural sexual allure. (Come to think of it, maybe\nit _was_ a bit naughty of Hyacinth to use her goddess-like supersexuality\nto seduce the virginal Silk, hence also stripping him, Delilah-like, of\nhis own (pseudo-)spiritual ability to talk with Gods. I can certainly see\nwhy Horn might think so).\nAnd, to add insult to injury, Hyacinth not only \"stole\" Silk from Horn,\nbut also abandoned him later. For what appears to have been a very\ncapricious reason - but again we only have Horn's word for this.\n\nRandom musings:\nSexuality. There's quite a lot of sex in the Long Sun, especially in\nExodus,\nand some of it is explicitly homosexual in nature (lesbian soldiers and\ntransvestite spies). When I finished Exodus, one of my first thoughts was\nthat the sex in New Sun had been all, and unspokenly, heterosexual, and\nI wondered if Gene was in some way making up for this. But, of course,\nmy memory was at fault. There's certainly lesbianism in New Sun, and\nbetween fairly major characters, too. I think the only reason that this\nseems important to me is that authors who never even seem to consider that\ntheir characters might have non-mainstream sexualities often seem to be\nvery bad ones.\n\nHorn's narrative bias, again. Horn's view of the inhumi seems particularly\ninteresting now we know the nature of the sequel. As I've pointed out\nbefore, his description at the end of Exodus is wildly self-inconsistent.\nAfter having told us over hundreds of pages how Quetzal managed to\npass himself off as a senior priest for over thirty years, he describes the\ninhumi as possessed of only rudimentary subhuman intelligence (lower\nthan dogs, I think he says).\nAssuming that this isn't a satirical comment on the  intelligence of the\nclergy (<g>) it seems to leave the colonists with an interesting (and far \nfrom\nunprecedented) prejudice-based military problem: they think that their\nenemies are enormously stupid, while in reality they are at least as\nintelligent as themselves...\n\nnewt"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}