Key to the Universe

Jeff Wilson · 18 Dec 2010, 07:29 · from 2010-December.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: Sat, 18 Dec 2010 01:29:35 -0600
Subject: (urth) Key to the Universe
In-Reply-To: <792639.46457.qm at web84104.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
References: <792639.46457.qm at web84104.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <4D0C62DF.2060308 at io.com>

On 12/17/2010 3:53 PM, DAVID STOCKHOFF wrote:
> I know what you mean.
>
> On one hand, the Alice quote is a legitimate literary allusion. On the
> other hand, Jonas quotes it.
>
> It appears that Urth has tracked Earth unnervingly closely in some ways.
> But if you look at the Jungle Room, where apparently historical
> characters appear anachronistically, perhaps there are serious
> differences, proving that there can be serious differences.

Remember, in the BOTNS, time proceeds only mostly linearly, with many 
loops and echoes backwards and possibly forewards. If we take other 
metafictional hints in the BOTNS, the universe(s) described in the Book 
are themselves book-like, proceeding from draft to draft with the best 
lines and tropes congealing around the plot skeleton. The Increate, 
outside of time, fiddles with manuscript, keeping some elements while 
rearranging others, and trying to work in His favored set pieces like 
the Flood where He can.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
Computational Intelligence Laboratory - Texas A&M Texarkana
< http://www.tamut.edu/CIL >

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