An Old mystery ...

Jeff Wilson · 06 Dec 2008, 06:04 · from 2008-December.txt.gz

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From: jwilson at io.com (Jeff Wilson)
Date: Sat, 06 Dec 2008 00:04:56 -0600
Subject: (urth) An Old mystery ...
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Message-ID: <493A1608.8020800 at io.com>

John Watkins wrote:
> On 12/5/08, Jeff Wilson <jwilson at io.com> wrote:
>> John Watkins wrote:
>>> Roy explained it back in June.
>>>
>>>
>> http://lists.urth.net/htdig.cgi/urth-urth.net/2008-June/009108.html
>> His argument is well reasoned, but it rests on some fine hair splitting that
>> falls below the demonstrated level of lexical resolution of dialogue in the
>> Book that is translated across universes and back in time. "we condemned"
>> simply can't be taken at literal face value in a book deliberately written
>> to be ambiguous at every level.
>>
> 
> "We have condemned" strikes me as remarkably straight-forward.  

So do it. It's very suspicious that a tongueless being from another 
universe is so succinct in their communication with a race they've never 
met before.

> A
> character claims responsibility for something that, logically, she
> would be better off denying.  What's your proposed reading of that
> bit?
> 
> I guess it could mean "We (by not taking direct action after Typhon
> screwed everything up) have (in effect) condemned..." but that seems
> to me to be a more tortured reason.

Or perhaps they have condemned the peoples of Urth in the soverign 
governmental sense, and taken their fate out of the hands of humans 
after human agency allowed the poisoning of the sun.

> Additionally, without Apheta's claim of responsibility for the black
> hole, what are we to make of it?

I'm pretty sure there was talk of Scylla being behind it.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
< http://www.io.com/~jwilson >

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