The Case for Mundanity

Dave Lebling · 18 Dec 2007, 01:06 · from 2007-December.txt.gz

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From: dlebling at hyraxes.com (Dave Lebling)
Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2007 20:06:28 -0500
Subject: (urth) The Case for Mundanity
In-Reply-To: <24440.20432.qm at web63915.mail.re1.yahoo.com>
References: <24440.20432.qm at web63915.mail.re1.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <47671D14.4030801 at hyraxes.com>

I tend to take a very mundane approach to the Urth-Lune, Blue-Green, St. 
Croix-St. Anne question, which I may have previously posted. It's that 
Wolfe is fascinated by many questions involving dualities that are 
blurred by history, volition and circumstance, such as the distinction 
between humans and robots, the souled and the unsouled, the past and the 
future, the hunter and the victim (in fact there is a fairly long 
paragraph on this one in one of the New Sun books), the wolf(e) and the 
civilized man, and so on. Some of these dichotomies are expressed in 
very explicit physical form, and Blue versus Green is certainly one of them.

I'm also on the mundane end of the spectrum as far as many of the minor 
difficulties with chronology and sequence in the whole NS/LS/SS cycle, 
which is that a series of books written over nearly twenty years, each 
sub-series of which was unforeseen when the previous one was written, 
are going to contain some problematic dissonances because, for all the 
evidence to the contrary, Gene Wolfe is in fact human. To directly 
address one of the current issues, I think that Wolfe thought the idea 
of geologic strata made of the detritus of humanity was an incredibly 
cool idea (the cliff, the fact that "miner" means something closer to 
"archeologist" on Urth, the mountain range totally sculpted into human 
images -- who wouldn't pay to see that movie?). He's not Hal Clement, so 
he didn't sit down and calculate out all the geology and history, he 
just wrote the story, and years later he wrote more stories that twisted 
the chronology still more, and so on. Even though I don't believe that 
100,000-years-in-the-future makes geological sense, it makes reasonable 
literary sense (and sometimes even Jove nods). And by the way, Typhon 
annoyed the hierodules by trying to rule the galaxy and they put the 
black hole in the sun; it's said in almost so many words in 'Sword of 
the Lictor.' So there! (/grin)

Anyway, I realize speculation and literary treasure-hunting is immensely 
fun, but sometimes it involves ignoring the forest (the excellent 
stories, puzzles and jokes that really are there, such as Severian's 
parentage or the appearance of a "Green Room" that really is green) for 
the trees (farfetched late-Heinlein or late-Asimov connectivity among 
series -- another hobby horse I've posted about; not everything needs to 
relate to everything else, and not everyone needs to be everyone else -- 
it's a big universe and Wolfe knows that).

This doesn't mean I want or expect people to stop speculating, but 
perhaps to turn the speculation knob down a smidge from 11.

-- Dave Lebling, aka vizcacha

Recursive Loop wrote:
> Greetings:
>
> "Where I disagree with you is that I do think these discussions are interesting and are obviously
> one of the major reasons why people end up on this list."
>
> I noticed a couple of remarks of late in the order of "well, if you only checked the archives,
> you'd see we hashed it over in 19XX."
>
>

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