Welcome aboard, Josh Smith! Interesting discussion - but on another tack completely...
Has anybody else ever noted or commented on the following (entirely unremarkable and certainly insignificant) coincidence of plot motifs?
Last Monday, Cath (wife) got Charlotte (6 year old daughter) a copy of "Tintin and the Lake of Sharks" from the library van when it stopped off in our village, and I've been reading it to Charlotte as a bed-time story. I'm a great Tintin fan, but I've always turned my nose up at the "Lake of Sharks", because it's not by Hergé, the pen name of Beligian illustrator Georges Remi, the man who invented Tintin and drew and wrote all the other Tintin books. It's just the book version of a feature-length cartoon film that they made back in 1972, based on Hergé's characters, but actually written by "Greg", the editor-in-chief of "Tintin" magazine. I was interested to note, however, that the story contains a set of baddies who work from a secret underwater base hidden in the depths of an inland lake. Their hide-out even contains a submarine pen and a submarine to take the baddies between the lake shore and their submerged headquarters.
Hm...
Remind you of anything Lupine?
Surely not, it can't be!
I admit that the idea of "Tintin and the Lake of Sharks" as a possible source for "Lake of the Long Sun" is pretty far-fetched, but I thought I'd just give it a Whorl...
Nigel Price (who still hasn't finished his essay on Blish and Wolfe - sorry, Mantis!) Minety, Wiltshire England
*This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun.