Imps

John Gersten · 15 Oct 1998, 11:36 · from urth-v0020.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: "John Gersten" <jgersten at slip.net>
Subject: Re: (urth) Imps
Date: Thu, 15 Oct 1998 11:36:47
Message-ID: <urth-v0020-0018 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0020/0018.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

>When Severian as a very young boy runs his first errand to the Witches
>Tower, he tells us "I was ushered into the presence of an old woman who sat
>in the only chair I had yet seen there, staring through a glass tabletop at
>what appeared to be an artificial landscape inhabited by hairless, crippled
>animals."
>
>But what might these hairless, crippled animals be?

I always thought this was just a large microscope, which Sev would perforce
see as a thing of wonder.  After a quick glance, I could see someone with no
knowledge of bacteriology or cell biology interpreting this as an
"artificial landscape inhabited by hairless, crippled animals."

Of course, this "view-from-above of crippled animals" may well be how the
spacefaring characters in the book regard the denizens of Urth (or even how
Wolfe views them <grin>)....

John

*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