Hierodules and time

thalassocrat at nym.hush.com · 26 May 2006, 14:05 · 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: thalassocrat at nym.hush.com (thalassocrat at nym.hush.com)
Date: Sat, 27 May 2006 00:05:17 +1000
Subject: (urth) Hierodules and time
Message-ID: <20060526140517.97BEADA82E at mailserver8.hushmail.com>

On Fri, 26 May 2006 23:43:40 +1000 b sharp 
<bsharporflat at hotmail.com> wrote:
>Thalassocrat, sorry I should have been more clear!  If the 
>knowledge of the 
>play at Baldanders' castle is not a Wolfe mistake then seems to be 

>using 
>Ossipago in that capacity ("he has a memory like yours").  Q. How 
>do they 
>know?   A. Ossipago told them.

But when F says "Only O here has memory like yrs", I think it's 
clear she means like Sev's, who had just said, "I remember 
everything vey well, as you had better know at once". O's a 
machine, so he remembers stuff well; there's nothing in the 
passage, or elsewhere AFAIK, to suggest he has a special time-
fixing role.

>
>Hence the deus ex machina reference (and thanks for finding it!).  

>Gosh, who 
>could be more of a God and a Machine than hierodule/robot 
>Ossipago? He fits 
>the phrase (defined below) almost perfectly and I suspect Wolfe 
>had this in 
>mind as he wrote.

But O doesn't get introduced "suddenly". I'm sure the term really 
refers to the equivalent of suddenly dropping a god into the play 
to put the brakes on the otherwise-inevitable denouement. It's "god 
from a machine (ie, a crane)" not "god and machine", of course, and 
anyway O isn't a god or at all god-like. 

Not that it matters; it's a tiny issue, I confess, but time travel 
always annoys me. And I can't help feeling that Wolfe has something 
devious going on here, and that I'm missing it completely, which is 
irritating <g>.

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