living a score

Dan Parmenter · 10 Jul 1998, 14:37 · from urth-v0016.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: Dan Parmenter <dan at lec.com>
Subject: (urth) living a score
Date: Fri, 10 Jul 1998 14:37:06
Message-ID: <urth-v0016-0045 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0016/0045.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

From: m.driussi at genie.com

>With that out of the way--Inire as regent: what a dumb idea!  Poor
>little wry-neck Inire, ancient and twisted!  They only live a score
>of years!  (That's 20, for you ultramoderns--so Inire is what, 19 or
>21 already?)  Serving autarchs since Ymar, skipping through the
>corridors of time!  All reinforcing the notion that the trip to Yesod
>was thought to take less than a year.

Surely not *all* Hierodules only live to be 20.  I seem to recall we
only hear that of Famulimus and Barbatus.  What about the Cumaean?

BTW, on an unrelated point, do people assume that the advanced tech of
the Extra Solaraians is of a sort that can essentially allow for a
spaceship of any shape?  If so, is the ship of the Hieros we see
hovering over Baldanders' castle intended to look like a standard
Flying Saucer (which is how it is described) so that it will influence
the past's perceptions/expectations of how extraterrestrial crafts
should look?  Wolfe has admitted to having some fondness for UFO books
(In the intro to STORYES).  I've always been fascinated by the fact
that image of a "saucer" apparently was apparently originally invoked
by Kenneth Arnold to describe the *motion* of what he saw, not its
shape.  I believe that disc-shaped UFOs had been reported before, but
I'm assuming that the modern conception of the "flying saucer" is a
1950's thing and this seems to be what Wolfe is tapping into, complete
with bug-eyed monster crews, etc.  Perhaps if he'd grown up in the
post-Strieber age he'd be describing them differently.

D

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

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