{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/whorl/634",
    "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": 634,
    "subject": "(Blue) Spoilers Abounding",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "1999-09-24T12:38:55+00:00",
    "last": "1999-09-24T12:38:55+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<whorl-v0010-0029@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Alex David Groce",
        "address": "alex_groce at gs246.sp.cs.cmu.edu"
      },
      "date": "1999-09-24T12:38:55+00:00",
      "subject": "(whorl) (Blue) Spoilers Abounding",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Well, I'm on page 170, having just finished the Chapter \"Seawrack\" before\ngoing to bed and have some random comments:\n\n(1)  I'm glad to see Wolfe returning to first-person narrative.  I love LONG\nSUN, but I think Wolfe's strongest writing is almost always when he's giving\nus a narrator's view (PEACE, first part of 5HC, BOTNS, \"Seven American Nights\")\nof things.  It's interesting to note that once again, Wolfe has us reading not\na story, crafted by Gene Wolfe, but an artifact--\"Horn's Book,\" edited by\nHoof and Hide (and presumably their wives).  Wolfe shares this habit with\nNabokov--he loves to explain how the work you're reading came about, even to\ninclude in the narrative the (fictional) circumstances under which it was \nwritten--BOTNS, BOTLS (as a massive surprise at the end), \"Seven American\nNights\", the soldier books, PEACE, Urth (which gives us a good explanation for\nhow Severian's first narrative ended up in Wolfe's back yard), and so on.  The\nnumber one question I have right now is, \"Who IS the narrator?\"  He says his\nname is Horn, and in some sense this is clearly true.  On the other hand, he\nsays that Horn is dead, and refers to Horn a few jarring times in the third\nperson.  Something strange is going on here, but I haven't yet a clue what\nexactly it is--also, people seem to think he's Silk, but that is easier to\nexplain.  This whole Rajan business is also reasonable, after all, Wolfe's\nBOOK OF THE X SUN protagonists have a curious habit of becoming the proper\nrulers of their states.\n\n(2)  At first I thought that Seawrack's mother was an undine from BOTNS.  Now\nthat it appears she can change shape this seems less likely, but it leads to\nan interesting (if almost certainly wrong) hypothesis.  What if the Whorl is\nthe Urth of the New Sun?  This would explain Wolfe's suggestion that Severian\nmay show up in these books.  Green, then, would be Luna with it's orbit\naltered significantly.  I'm trying to piece together from the geographical\ndescriptions a map of the continents, but as the geography of Urth may have\nchanged drastically after the New Sun, I'm not sure this will help.  This\nis almost certainly wrong--I don't see where the inhumi would come from (unless\nthey were always on Luna and now are free to \"fly across\" thanks to the orbit\nchange), and three-hundred years seems far too short a time between the end\nof Typhon's age and the coming of the New Sun.  Of course, Seawrack's Mom \ncould be an undine, but not on Urth--they are said to fly the stars, after all.\nPerhaps \"Mother\" is something more like Erebus or Abaia, able to take the \nshapes of what the monsters on Urth take as brides.\n\n(3)  Seawrack is another one of Wolfe's portraits of Love, the Goddess, woman,\nwhatever.\n\n(4)  This book has a very Vancean feel--even more so than most of Wolfe's work.\nI'm not sure where it comes from, other than that Horn's quest seems more\npicaresque than Severian's (Severian's move from gate to gate and back again\nis, even before you know where it is going, a very determined seeming thing--\nhe has some presentiment of where it's going from the beginning)--and Silk\ndidn't really cover all that much geographical territory.  Perhaps it's the\nsailing (as usual, Wolfe shows a striking interest in the details of sailing--\na very \"Incarnational\" interest in the hard edges of how things are done that\nis also present in his interest (evidenced a lot so far in BLUE) in how to \nmake things--paper, crops, a business).\n\n\n\n\"And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.\" John 8:32"
        },
        {
          "kind": "sig",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Alex David Groce (agroce+ at cs.cmu.edu)\nPh.D. Student, Carnegie Mellon University - Computer Science Department\n8112 Wean Hall (412)-268-3066\nhttp://www.cs.cmu.edu/~agroce\n\n*This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun."
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}