{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/whorl/803",
    "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": 803,
    "subject": "Horn as anithero?",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "2000-04-03T20:43:04+00:00",
    "last": "2000-04-03T20:43:04+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<whorl-v0010-0293@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Alice Turner",
        "address": "pei047 at attglobal.net"
      },
      "date": "2000-04-03T20:43:04+00:00",
      "subject": "(whorl) Horn as anithero?",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "Adam Stephanides wrote:\nWhen I started the book, Horn seemed a decent guy trying to do the right\nthing (despite his prejudice against Sinew)--not as saintly as Silk, but\nnot nearly as twisted as Severian.  But then I got to the part where\nHorn, in essence, sells his family to Krait to get out of the pit. \nShortly afterwards, he brutally rapes Seawrack.  And later, as Rajan, he\ndigs up and revives inhumi to use against the Hannese troops, which\ncould be seen as the Blue equivalent of biological warfare.  At this\npoint I was ready to say that Horn was worse than Severian.\n\nWhen I read the book again, I realized that one could put forward\nmitigating circumstances in each case.  Horn in the pit was\npsychologically weakened by his extreme thirst and fear, and vulnerable\nto Krait's manipulations.  Besides, Krait had threatened to attack\nHorn's family if Horn didn't convince him to rescue him, so it could be\nargued that Horn was actually protecting his family (though Horn never\nmakes this argument).  Similarly, one could argue, as has been done on\nthis list, that Horn was not responsible for his rape because of\nSeawrack's song, although Horn explicitly rejects this excuse (and that\nline of argument is unlikely to win Wolfe friends among feminists).  And\nas for reviving the inhumi, Horn was fighting a war which he regarded as\njustified, and there would have been some inhumi around anyway.\n\nSo is Horn an antihero or a flawed but fundamentally decent man?  My\nsense is that Wolfe is generally sympathetic to his flawed protagonists,\nbut few if any of them have transgressed as seriously as Horn.  The\nquestion isn't made easier by my doubts as to how trustworthy Horn's\nnarrative is; at one point (the start of Ch. 12), Horn accuses himself\nof writing a \"tissue of half-truths,\" without being very specific."
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Adam, the points you raise are serious ones. My opinion, fwiw, is that he is a flawed but fundamentally decent man (and I too was horrified by the rape, as you can see in the archives). The psychological complexity set up in this book is far beyond that of anything Wolfe has ever written before, which bodes awfully well for the series. Maybe a couple of reminders: 1) it is shaping up as based closely on the Odyssey, whose hero was also complex and not always heroic; 2) the time shifts in the narrative allow us to see Horn eventually in Silk's body; he is not Silk, as he tells us again and again, but there are remnants of the old personality (just the way you can't erase programs completely from your computer), and Silk is a depressive; 3) this is a first book in a series; it is possible that Wolfe will allow Horn to develop as time goes on. I also think the Krait thing is rather complex, although perhaps that is hindsight, given how the relationship with Krait develops. But Ho!\n!\nrn refers to the episode in the pit, always, as the worst event of his life. I don't think he was altogether rational at the time.\n\n-alga\n\n\n*This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun."
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}