The mystery of the image of an astronaut cleaned by Rudesind

James Wynn · 07 Jul 2010, 18:49 · 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: crushtv at gmail.com (James Wynn)
Date: Wed, 07 Jul 2010 13:49:55 -0500
Subject: (urth) The mystery of the image of an astronaut cleaned by
	Rudesind
In-Reply-To: <4C34C8AF.70507 at gmail.com>
References: <SNT123-W256DB5C8585628C8109423CFB30 at phx.gbl>	<520E36C4-BC0B-4DFE-8F64-BC9EB1D9BF4C at liftingfaces.com>	<4C34A1F4.6030501 at gmail.com>	<F7C7A8D7-66C9-4746-9662-C742E53311FE at liftingfaces.com>	<AANLkTilkfznBstbta55hgfGmNqnPuJiBaxTBg1nk4CNf at mail.gmail.com>	<4C34C6AF.9060709 at gmail.com>
	<4C34C8AF.70507 at gmail.com>
Message-ID: <4C34CC53.8080700 at gmail.com>

On 7/7/2010 1:34 PM, Ant?nio Pedro Marques wrote:
> James Wynn wrote (07-07-2010 19:25):
>
>> Does it deciding that Kent is Superman change the story in any way? I
>> mean, Superman still has to rescue Lois, right?
>
> If Superman were not Clark, where would he have met Lois? Ok, she's a
> journalist and he's a public figure. If Superman were someone else other
> than Clark, wouldn't he have other singificant people in his alternate 
> life
> whom we know zilch about? Among whom probably some love interest.
> Kent being Superman doesn't change the story because in the sorty 
> that's precisely who Kent is. Kent not being Superman would certainly 
> call for a quite different story.

I was being factitious in order to make a point. If Inire were also 
variously Rudesind and a monkey, it would affect the story if only that 
it would mean Inire might be a Hierogrammate. It would mean that the 
grammates were affecting humanity directly. I say "might" because we 
don't really know Hierodules can't shapeshift. If he is a Hierodules and 
can shape-shift then it means Hierodules can shapeshift. And familiarity 
with Wolfe's other novels shows that Inire wouldn't have to be able to 
shape-shift in order to look like someone totally different.

It's not that I have an opinion either way. It's just that I don't think 
theories should be countered with mere hand-waving.Ultimately, much that 
goes on in a Wolfe novel is unprovable if your standards for proof are 
at all stringent. The best one can hope for is to prove that something 
is flatly denied in the text in a way that a liar would not undermine 
(which is very difficult in itself). Think of how the details in UotNS 
have affected the way we understand tBotNS. Then consider that Wolfe had 
not intended to write UotNS.

u+16b9

> _______________________________________________
> Urth Mailing List
> To post, write urth at urth.net
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net

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