Digest urth.v025.n005

David Wells · 12 Apr 1999, 10:27 · from urth-v0025.mbox · original

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: David Wells <ADW at ovum.com>
Subject: (urth) RE: Digest urth.v025.n005
Date: Mon, 12 Apr 1999 11:27:06 +0100
Message-ID: <urth-v0025-0052 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0025/0052.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

>Speaking of ambiguity, we might remember that the Long Sun books were
>written by a colonist (Horn) who may not have been entirely impartial in
>his portrayal of Quetzal and the inhumi.  Some of the scenes where we get
>the most characterization of Quetzal must be somewhat speculative
>reconstruction on Horn's part, or at best second or third hand accounts
>(such as the scenes with Quetzal and Remora).

Indeed. At the end of Exodus, Horn describes the inhumi as being
"no more intelligent than dogs". As one of them posed successfully as
a senior clergyman on the Whorl for around 30 years, this is either a
particularly biting satire on the clergy (which I rather doubt) or evidence
that Horn, at least, is suffering from a seriously misapprehension.

...which apart from any moral dilemmas it may cause, may also lead
to nasty surprises for the colonists when they try to defend themselves
against an opponent which they so seriously underestimate.

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

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