Wolfe at Dragon*Con (AEG)

Roy C. Lackey · 09 Sep 2009, 23:18 · from 2009-September.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: rclackey at stic.net (Roy C. Lackey)
Date: Wed, 9 Sep 2009 18:18:32 -0500
Subject: (urth) Wolfe at Dragon*Con (AEG)
References: <525AA15A5C4C4ECB9661CA5B33636DEF@usa513ef87f031>
Message-ID: <002101ca31a3$dd374e60$44d14a0c@rclackey>

James Wynn wrote:

> Look, maybe this has already been said, but don't recall it. I thought I'd
> surely get a reaction on this quote so I'm going up the ante. For reasons,
> that would be compelling only to me, the death of Bill Reise at the end of
> AEG really sat wrong with me. It struck me as totally random. But if the
> person killed on the island were Gideon Chase in disguise, it makes
> perfectly good sense. Also, Bill Reise avowing his love for Cassie at his
> death seemed so out-of-character.
>
> So when Wolfe said this in the panel on Fictional Characters, a series of
> tumblers fell into place in my head. It was Bill Reise disguised as Gideon
> Chase who left for Woldercon at the end of AEG. Cassie didn't go to
> Woldercon merely to get her mojo back (although she would probably need to
> in order to win Reise).

Reis was a big man; Gideon was not. A conventional disguise or one that
involves a "glamour", to say nothing of shape shifting, would have to
account for Gid's missing leg. Shape shifting involves a certain
conservation of mass, such that the subject will weigh the same after the
transformation as before.

Cassie told Klauser that Reis was dead, and at the end of the book, when
there was no one to hear her and she was on the way to Woldercan, she
bemoaned his death. Who was she fooling?

She had been in perfect position to see the body that had been clubbed to
death, and she had been forced to watch. Shape-changers and glamour-casters
lose control at death. Who did Cassie--and more importantly the
islanders--see dead at her feet, if not Bill Reis? I don't think it is
possible for it to have been one-legged Gideon Chase.

-Roy

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