Subject: (whorl) talus relevance

From: Joel Priddy <jpriddy at saturn.vcu.edu>
Date: Tue, 24 Jun 1997 12:17:31 +0000

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

I'd just like to bring up two aspects of the talus scene that
made it seem relevant to me... hmmm... maybe three...

(1) It was good pacing. A little bit of calm after so much
high-level action and intrigue. It was nice to sit back and just
listen to an explanation of how something worked.
(2) Character development. In this scene you could see Silk
seriously and competently taking on the mantel of Calde. Of
course, he'd done some of this before, but I still thought of him
as an "Average Schmo caught up in Bigger Things." Now I saw him
digging in for a long haul, and preparing to handle the
unpleasant side of leadership.
(3) Red Herring. With the talus scene, I began to expect certain
events to follow. The actual events worked against this
expectation, which lent emotional punch to the idea of chaos and
unpredictability in times of conflict.

There's no reason why this might not still point to Silk and the
Super-Talus Squad making a major appearance in the next series.
I think that the scene worked on for the _Long_Sun_ as a
single unit, however.

-cephalothorax-