The poor Aelf

Roy C. Lackey · 28 Sep 2007, 22:15 · from 2007-September.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: rclackey at stic.net (Roy C. Lackey)
Date: Fri, 28 Sep 2007 17:15:56 -0500
Subject: (urth) The poor Aelf
Message-ID: <001201c8021d$277befc0$91c95a42 at rclackey.stic.net>

Rostrum wrote:
>But to take a completely different tack, maybe we need to question
>this idea that the Aelf have no souls.  How do we know that?  Who told
>them that?

It was Able who delivered the info (WIZARD, p-46), but it seems to be common
knowledge. Its validity is apparently corroborated by Able's view of Disiri
while wearing the magic helmet. The Aelf are granted very long natural lives
in compensation.

> In the Sun books, Wolfe is constantly giving us robots,
>animals, vampire leeches, etc. that people treat as soul-less, but
>turn out to show evidence of a soul.  And in many of those cases, the
>souls seem somehow derived from contact with human beings.  So maybe
>the truth is that the Aelf have no souls if they are untethered to the
>human beings above them through whom they would derive a soul?

This was discussed in the last quarter of '05. Disiri is the only Aelf to
receive a soul (if she did) we are shown in the text. Able's blood *seemed*
to be the medium. Baki got Toug's blood, but I don't see that she gained a
soul by it. The only differences I can see are love and Able's status as a
god. If there is a rational explanation of this Aelf/soul business, I think
it has to be largely in that chapter four.

-Roy

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