AEG only semi-spoilish

Dave Tallman · 20 Nov 2008, 12:51 · from 2008-November.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: davetallman at msn.com (Dave Tallman)
Date: Thu, 20 Nov 2008 05:51:04 -0700
Subject: (urth) AEG only semi-spoilish
In-Reply-To: <20081120100112.4675F48043 at diego.dreamhost.com>
References: <20081120100112.4675F48043 at diego.dreamhost.com>
Message-ID: <49255D38.90703 at gmail.com>

Mo Holkar wrote:
> I'm happy to buy that -- I don't think Wolfe would have wanted to 
> handle that material on any other basis -- but I'd like to see an 
> exposition of the way the larger Christian picture might be seen to 
> inform the events of AEG, because to me it's not all clear.
>   

There is Christianity in Wolfe's future world. Cassie encounters it 
through Margaret (especially in her song "Walk in the Reign") and in her 
role as Mariah Brownlea. Her star-power causes her roles to become real 
to her, so I believe she gets in touch with real spirituality through 
these songs and roles. It's like the concept of "act as if" in 12-step 
programs. She begins to get ideas like "add nothing to God and you get 
good."

I believe this makes her stronger and able to face adversity in the end 
much better than she could have before. Her relationship with Reis has 
elements of allegory with Christ and the Church, though Reis is far from 
perfect as a Christ-figure (like Severian, his action to redeem his 
world involves mass flooding and destruction).

In the end, Cassie seems redeemed from a shallow, materialistic life. 
Her hope that Wally will somehow come back to her is like that of 
Christians waiting for the return of Christ.

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