Inhumi in the Whorl

James Wynn · 18 Aug 2010, 15:47 · from 2010-August.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, 18 Aug 2010 10:47:46 -0500
Subject: (urth) Inhumi in the Whorl
In-Reply-To: <SNT123-W16A7CC297074AF6A03749ACF9D0 at phx.gbl>
References: <SNT123-W16A7CC297074AF6A03749ACF9D0 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <4C6C00A2.4050001 at gmail.com>

>> James Wynn- When I say Scylla, I mean the megatherian of Urth.
>> The reason I suggest it is only that the original Scylla is does make an
>> appearance in "Short Sun". They seem very similar. It makes literary
>> sense is all. I have no further information to defend that hypothesis.
> Lee - Yes, Scylla is mentioned once as a megatherian of Urth. But the same name is
> used in Long Sun as daughter to Pas/Typhon. From an author who has said
> he thinks one subtle clue should be all his readers ever need to figure
> out everything, this seems of sledgehammer impact to me.

But, as you know, determining which clue is the right one is the trick.

Scylla on the Whorl is software entity and she came with the Whorl. When 
we do meet her in the Short Sun books, she is in Oreb and her original 
form as a young girl. We learned that she consciously named herself 
*after* the megatherian for whom she was an agent. Echidna might well be 
hiding out in one or more of the colonists, but how could she become Mother?

The megatherian Scylla is a solid being. A gigantic underwater dweller.
Megatherian, Mother, Vironese Scylla. Which one of these is not like the 
others?

Look, in the five New Sun books, we never meet a megatherian that I know 
of. In the Short Sun, the main character travels all the way to Urth to 
meet one. It's not one of the big  "male" megatherians either (Erebus or 
Abaia). It's the one named after a Greek female monster. And then we 
have huge undersea creature on Blue named Mother. I'm just sayin'. It's 
"fishy".

u+16b9

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