New Wolfe Story at Subterranean Press

Matthew King · 26 Jun 2007, 21:13 · from 2007-June.txt.gz

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From: automatthew at gmail.com (Matthew King)
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2007 16:13:05 -0500
Subject: (urth) New Wolfe Story at Subterranean Press
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If I hadn't known the story was by Wolfe, this sentence would have  
revealed it:
?I?m going to pry, Roberta. I?m going to ask you about things that  
are none of my business. I hope you?ll answer.?

Secondly, in response to a few of Joel Sieh's observations:

> - Roberta the robot girl pities Robber the robot dog, and through  
> this we get to see her self pity.  At the same time she pities him,  
> she loves him.  Maybe she loves him because he is like her, or  
> because she empathizes with him.  And maybe her understanding is  
> why he loves her (as shown by his attempts to get back to her - I'd  
> like to think it's because she understands and values him, and not  
> just because they're both robots).

I think this exchange is important:
-----
?Robber thinks he?s a real dog.? The words held a world of agony.
?Does he??

?Yes! He?s?he?s a thing, but he thinks he?s a real dog.? She turned  
away and ran into her house.

-----

So has the narrator caused Roberta to lose her innocence by leading  
her to  "realize" that she is a thing, not a real girl?  I use the  
scare quotes because Wolfe has consistently shown in his other work  
that one needn't be human to be people.

>
>
> - I think Julianne kills Rover the real dog....  At least that's  
> what the narrator wants us to think, without coming out and saying it.
>
> - Maybe the narrator does, but I don't think so.  There's the  
> repeated hedge imagery when Rover comes into his yard and when the  
> dog dies, but I think it more likely that the narrator is some  
> incarnation of death....  Or something.  His talk at the beginning  
> about the inevitability of death, his fascination with the girls,  
> his attempt at proving the value of living things through his dog- 
> swapping experiment, and his collection of the dead dog at the end  
> lead me in that direction.

I don't believe the dog was dead.  The narrator guessed that Rover  
had followed Julianne home, and when he went there, he "found Rover  
lying quietly" under Julianne's bedroom window.  Rover was pining for  
Julianne, not for the fjords.

The surface story (Roy Lackey's term) seems simple on this point of  
unrequited love.  Robot dog loves robot girl, and flesh dog loves  
flesh girl.  One or both girls do not love their counterpart dogs in  
return.

Julianne tells the narrator that she likes the robot better because  
he "don't mess the carpet".  If Julianne is not dissimulating, this  
supports the narrator's disgust for the sterile civilization.

Perhaps Roberta, in answer to my question above, refuses to love the  
robot dog so as to avoid hard thoughts about her own nature.

Roberta is wrong, though, in thinking that Robber is not a real dog.   
Were he just a thing, Julianne's family would not need to keep him  
chained up.

> As a side note, I thought "penetrated" was an odd word choice in  
> the following sentence: "Roberta's puppy had penetrated the hedge  
> that separates the Robinson's back yard from our own."  With the  
> screaming in the same paragraph, it could take on a violent or  
> sinister quality like what Michael Swanwick says of "A Solar  
> Labyrinth".
>
> - A question that popped out at me while I was reading:  Who is the  
> "our" in the "our own" in the sentence quoted above?
>

And why does the narrator give himself the role of the evil dwarf in  
his imagining of a fecund human past?

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