Subject: (whorl) tens and nines

From: m.driussi <m.driussi at genie.com>
Date: Mon, 08 Sep 1997 16:24:00 +0000

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

Wombat,

Re: Marble's slipped decimal as ringing bells.  Well, I know what you
are talking about, I just haven't found any way to incorporate it
into the timeline I've developed!  Marble seems to be
semi-hallucinatory whenever she starts talking/seeing numbers; and as
much as I relish the full blown dreamlands of the corridors of time
and Silk's occasional nap, interpretation of this material is very
tricky--witness the Marble-merging-with-Mint ball of wax, begun in a
dream in one book, then seemingly corroborated at two complimentarily
symmetrical points (which turn out to be typos) in the last book.

About that flight time calculation I gave before, it is developed a
bit more fully in "Q&D"--the difficult guesses have to do with
acceleration in micro-gees.  If you shorten the flight time by
deciding that the ship arrived a hundred years earlier, we can redo
the numbers for a greater percentage of lightspeed, etc.

The references I cited were basically: the year-date on the circular
("332"); the comment by Tartaros that the original voices of the Nine
have been dead for a thousand years.

And back to the Nine--I find it curious that Philip Jose Farmer uses
undying titans for his secret masters of the world, aka, The Nine, in
his Tarzan/Doc Savage books.  Knowing that PJF is working with wild
mythic stuff (Robert Graves, Joseph Campbell, etc), I'm still wondering
about that Latin connection "Novensiles divi."

=mantis=

P.S.  Glad to hear you like the "Autopsy" piece.

=m=