Gene Wolfe is for Exultants

Jeff Wilson · 21 Dec 2010, 02:22 · 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: Mon, 20 Dec 2010 20:22:44 -0600
Subject: (urth) Gene Wolfe is for Exultants
In-Reply-To: <4D0F4B0C.1040100 at verizon.net>
References: <4D0A90E8.7010006 at gmail.com>	<000501cb9f58$21bb1bc0$65315340$@net.au>	<COL105-W18A266C8E7DB54A9969E7885180 at phx.gbl>	<AANLkTi=AUDuXrCSiSoFtk0tH1YOggD57+KNdGBf+h6eQ at mail.gmail.com>	<4D0EC4D7.5060701 at io.com>
	<4D0F4B0C.1040100 at verizon.net>
Message-ID: <4D100F74.1020407 at io.com>

On 12/20/2010 6:24 AM, David Stockhoff wrote:
> That's right---especially the second paragraph---and it's a theme in
> BOTNS, where the oppressive effects of this type of rule are clearly
> seen throughout the Commonwealth, and where the aristocracy are local
> colonial elites supported by alien technology. Typhon did the same with
> these technologies when he had them.

Interesting - I'm not as sure as you seem to be that the Exultants are 
just Urthlings writ large, but mentioning them in conjunction with 
Typhon, who mentioned his slaves of larger sizes makes me think they are 
connected.  This might explain why Exultant height is variously 
inherited and the result of a therapy - they're result of different 
experimental methods to set his favored servants litesrally above the 
common masses.

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

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