The Guild's Revolutionary

Gwern Branwen · 23 Nov 2009, 16:11 · from 2009-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: gwern0 at gmail.com (Gwern Branwen)
Date: Mon, 23 Nov 2009 11:11:40 -0500
Subject: (urth) The Guild's Revolutionary
In-Reply-To: <CB1CCF052BBA41FABC5DAC6EE841F2BE@eMachinePC>
References: <mailman.1.1258841747.28662.urth-urth.net at lists.urth.net>
	<4B086F89.10809 at verizon.net>
	<84D73864-A63A-4CC8-AD9F-CF9C7B400D25 at io.com>
	<CB1CCF052BBA41FABC5DAC6EE841F2BE@eMachinePC>
Message-ID: <cbf55b100911230811iff8f9d5v21e5598aa56bf5a4 at mail.gmail.com>

On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 9:00 AM, James Wynn <crushtv at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> For instance, I was all aboard the "Nessus is Buenos Aires" train when
>> I read _BotNS_ first at 13 or 14, because I was also in the throes of a
>> Borges phase and Master Ultan was obviously, clearly, no question
>> about it, Borges. ?Same with "Baldanders."
>> Later I found out this might be controversial.
>
> I've always thought the Borges=Ultan theory was tenuous. Not impossible,
> just not much supporting it beyond Utlan's blindness. Borges is a great
> writer, but other than "The Book of Imaginary Beings" which cites the
> Baldanders, I haven't noted much influence from him. Of course, that might
> be due to a deficiency in my Borges knowledge.

Well, besides all the many gobsmackingly obvious parallels, I believe
Wolfe in interviews has said as much (I'm sure I've read him say
Ultan=Borges in some of the interviews in _Shadows of the New Sun_,
although I'm not sure which one of my photocopies has it).

-- 
gwern

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