Lives of the Great Beasts

Jeff Wilson · 02 Jul 2010, 19:41 · from 2010-July.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: jwilson at io.com (Jeff Wilson)
Date: Fri, 02 Jul 2010 14:41:36 -0500
Subject: (urth) Lives of the Great Beasts
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTilx2dMaB7OYnqlFnKcr7NJwF_eV4Ht_qlQ6Y5-M at mail.gmail.com>
References: <AANLkTilx2dMaB7OYnqlFnKcr7NJwF_eV4Ht_qlQ6Y5-M at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <4C2E40F0.5070004 at io.com>

On 7/2/2010 1:38 PM, Jonathan Goodwin wrote:
> There was some discussion on the list recently, or at least I think
> there was, about the origins and nature of Abaia, Erebus, and the
> rest. I've just read the books again recently and had some questions I
> wanted to ask the list.
>
> The narrative function of the megatherians is quite clear, I think.
> The literary and mythological antecedents are also reasonably clear.
> What is not clear to me, however, is just what Wolfe had in mind about
> their nature, their arrival on Earth, or their motivation (though
> there's more evidence for this last than the others).

I don't think these are the same megatherians as the eponymous seventeen 
black magicians. Though some of the seventeen were doubtlessly in league 
with the mountain-sized crew, and I'd have to guess that they symbolize 
opportunist forces who bodily intrude where camel's nose, mortal sig, 
went before.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
IEEE Student Chapter Blog at
< http://ieeetamut.org >

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