AEG: Dr. Lao and Woldercan

Roy C. Lackey · 21 Sep 2009, 05:53 · from 2009-September.txt.gz

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From: rclackey at stic.net (Roy C. Lackey)
Date: Mon, 21 Sep 2009 00:53:33 -0500
Subject: (urth) AEG: Dr. Lao and Woldercan
Message-ID: <001001ca3a7f$df731800$e6d34a0c@rclackey>

Back on the 14th, Allan Anderson wrote:
> To snip a perhaps apropos phrase from Dr. Lao's Wikipedia summary,"..the
> mythical city of 'Woldercan', populated by doubles of the townfolk..."

This was in the context of the spelling of Woldercan, so perhaps not enough
attention was paid to it. A day or two later, I googled the quote and found
out that the Wikipedia summary in question is of the movie, not the book. So
I researched the book online for a while and concluded that the mentioned
"doubles" were not in the book. I may be wrong about that; I just don't
know.

Anyway, I was disappointed because, if there were some sort of analogs of
people on Woldercan, that would be a simple solution to the problem James
Wynn has raised about what Wolfe could have meant by his remark about
Cassie going to Woldercan to find Reis. I doubted that Wolfe would have
referenced the movie, rather than the book, upon which it is only loosely
based. So I blew it off.

Then I was reminded that Wolfe used references from the Oz movie in FLF, so
I may have been wrong to dismiss the possibility of him using the movie
version of Dr. Lao as a source in AEG. If there are duplictes of humans on
Woldercan, it eliminates the need for hypothetical time travel and other
problematic solutions.

What say you?

-Roy

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