Wolfe's Attitude toward his Readers

Gerry Quinn · 14 Aug 2010, 14:15 · from 2010-August.txt.gz

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From: gerryq at indigo.ie (Gerry Quinn)
Date: Sat, 14 Aug 2010 15:15:16 +0100
Subject: (urth) Wolfe's Attitude toward his Readers
References: <SNT123-W4850CAA5969E603A6F8EF5CF990 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <D324942F2D424CF387541A9AE51E1731@jill>


From: "Lee Berman" <severiansola at hotmail.com>
>>Gerry Quinn-
>>I posted on this before: I suggested that the apparent low entropy of the
>>numbers may be in order to add verisimilitude without inplying any 
>>specific
>>meaning assigned in the text.
>
> I'm sorry Gerry, I don't understand what you mean by "low entropy of the
> numbers. Could you explan?

You can think of it as jargon for "not random". They are plainly not a 
completely random string of digits.  A random string would have maximum 
entropy.  There are ways of quantifying the relative degree of disorder; 
somebody posted on it previously.

>>"Ora faltig teru dres, ent oru klen rebalen tafru."  That looks like a
>>sentence in a foreign language (either originating in or transcribed into
>>the Latin alphabet).  It is not entirely random: I made it to seem
>>pronouncable.and have a plausible distribution of word lengths etc., even 
>>an
>>echo between 'ora' and 'oru'.  But it means nothing!
>
> I must confess that I am one who becomes quickly annoyed by authors who 
> invent
> alien languages for their text (yes, even you, J.R.R., though you are 
> redeemed
> a bit by basing Elvish on Suomi (Finnish)). One of my true pleasures in 
> reading
> Gene Wolfe is that he instead takes pains to use extant words (albeit 
> sometimes
> nearly extinct words).
>
> If Wolfe wants to depict an undecipherable word he does not tend use our 
> alphabet
> to do so. He finds a way to describe the undecipherable symbol with color 
> and/or
> shape and/or descriptors like "gnostic" or "terratoid".
>
> As an engineer, I assume Gene Wolfe finds numbers to be almost as 
> important,
> symbolically, as letters. I would be unpleasantly surprised to learn he 
> has invented
> a fake paragraph of numbers when he is so averse to doing that same thing 
> to words.

But again - verisimiltude!  Would Pas's engineers and quartemasters have 
used strings of numbers, or a panoply of teratoid icons?  I expect that 
somewhere in Mainframe is a big list of what all vaults on the Whorl 
originally contained, indexed by number.  In a more controlled 
disembarkation, instructions would be passed down regarding which were to be 
opened.

- Gerry Quinn

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