17 megatherians

Adam Thornton · 19 May 2006, 03:14 · from 2006-May.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: adam at io.com (Adam Thornton)
Date: Thu, 18 May 2006 22:14:13 -0500
Subject: (urth) 17 megatherians
In-Reply-To: <BAY103-F15C0369C28F26CA7AE9282D7A70 at phx.gbl>
References: <BAY103-F15C0369C28F26CA7AE9282D7A70 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <4E036CBE-E825-46CB-AB6D-5893277F663D at io.com>

On May 18, 2006, at 8:30 PM, b sharp wrote:
> There are theories on why the number 17 might be important as a  
> significant
> and/or evil number to Gene Wolfe in BotNS.  Because Noah's flood  
> happened on
> 'February' 17?  Because Gene Wolf was in the 17th company (or some  
> other
> military division) in Korea? These aren't compelling to me.

It's the number used to mean "infinite" by the Minotaur in the Borges  
story "The House of Asterion."

"Group of Seventeen" thus becomes "Everyone"--quite literally The  
Will of The People.

Adam

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net