Digest urth.v013.n004

Peter Westlake · 12 Jun 1998, 09:58 · from urth-v0013.mbox · original

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: Peter Westlake <peter at harlequin.co.uk>
Subject: Re: (urth) Re: Digest urth.v013.n004
Date: Fri, 12 Jun 1998 10:58:51 +0100
Message-ID: <urth-v0013-0030 at digest.urth.net>
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At 23:56 1998-06-11 -0400, Alice Turner wrote:
>Four-Eyes:
>
>>what were the footsteps in the cave of
>>the man-apes? The first step "might have been the walking of a
>>tower on the Final Day..." (Claw, VI). And then two books later,
>>lo and behold, ".. a machine that flashed fire, a machine that
>>was like a tower walking." (Citadel, XXII).  Then scarcely a page
>>later, Mamillian's footstep remind Severian of "that I had once
>>waked in the mine of the man-apes." (Citadel, XXIII). It's like
>>a Martian war machine in the War of the Worlds!
>
>
>It's a Tall Ass! I love this! Bravo! And we just know the taluses are going
>to show up as important in TBOTSS because of the inordinate amount of time
>Wolfe spent on the factory that makes them, so it's a tie between the
>series. Hooray!

It's a bit bigger than that, isn't it? And it walks, too, rather than
having caterpillar tracks. When Severian looks at the Ascian armies
from the Autarch's flyer (why don't flyers float right off into space,
BTW?) he see "machines as big as fortresses", which I take to be the
same thing. They look like towers walking.

They might be intelligent in the same way as taluses, of course.
That would make more sense than having soldiers on board if you
were going to leave one down a mine for centuries.

(Would you really want one of those things aboard the Whorl?
 "Stamp! Stamp! Crunch, crack, wheeeeeee...")

Sbear.

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

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