interview questions

Lee Berman · 07 Jan 2011, 01:25 · from 2011-January.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: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee Berman)
Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2011 20:25:12 -0500
Subject: (urth) interview questions
Message-ID: <SNT123-W298DA50C1F5FC0DA6EB514CF0B0 at phx.gbl>

>Gerry Quinn: In _The Long and Short of It_ he spends ages trying to prove that Mme. 
>Etienne is an abo (she isn't, though Casilla may be).  Then he admits that it doesn't make 
>sense for Veil's Hypothesis to be true (for then VRT's handwriting would be like everyone else).  
>He asks, "then how are we to resolve the hypothesis?  Answer: we're not."  This is just another of 
>the multifarious ways to claim there is no valid solution.  when in fact all he has shown is that 
>the solution he's just been proposing is wrong, nothing more.

I don't think you read Borski correctly. Think of him an a jewish-american version of Gerrry Quinn
and you will understand him better, I think. Some people simply refuse to embrace ambiguity. Both
of you ultimately assert that ambiguity is just an author's trick. Smart people know the "correct"
answer all along. Check Borski's posts here from the past if you don't believe me. Then like now we
have a guy who is always sure he is right.

Regarding clones-

>They are approaching a constant state, exactly as repeated iterations of an 
>equation modelling the temperatures at every point inside a heated object 
>approach a constant state.  It is irrelevant whether the state is desirable 
>or not - the important point is that it is constant.

I'm not an engineering expert but I think relaxation is a measurement tool and not related to entropy and
tendency for heat distribution to even out. Heat transfer is the example given but it could as well be the 
measurement of stress (tension, compression etc) on an irregular object. 

If you can't achieve perfection in measurement for an irregular object as you could for a
mathematically regular object like a cube, you make an educated guess then measure actual results then
refine your guess and keep doing that until your estimation produces acceptably accurate results.

For abos it would be like, "first imitate the body and the gross behavior. Next acquire finer motor 
skills and more initimate personal knowledge. Next, add sexuality and social skills and the other difficult 
stuff. Keep refining until you approximate a human."

>Because a perfect imitation would no longer be an imitation

Your argument is with someone else. Even Aunt Jeannine chides Number Five on the semantic dishonesty of
 "perfect imitation".

>The characters are creatures of a sub-creation; they cannot see as clearly as we do.  

I've already addressed this. The characters can see their own story more clearly than we can if the author
so chooses. I gave the example of Tzadkiel who can see in n-dimensions. We cannont.

>Also, what would be the point in characters having correct theories?  If a book is good, these would be 
>redundant as they would merely spoil the readers pleasure in arriving at the correct theory from the clues 
>in the text.

Unless you spill the beans right in the beginning so blatantly that you fool the unwary reader into ignoring 
the right answer. Which Wolfe has done here.

>But imagine if an ordinary character proposed the correct answer earlier on - it would ruin the book!

Hardly. The obvious proof is 5HoC which has not been ruined. And Aunt Jeannine/Aubrey Veil is hardly an 
"ordinary" character. She is the perfect synthesis of science and intuition, male cloned into female form. 
Only she has the necessary components to understand the truth about herself and everyone around her. You can
hardly expect blundering, testosterone-laden males to figure out the truth by themselves. And they don't. They
are too busy trying to kill each other, imprison each other or act out juvenile carnal fantasies.

>But we KNOW when the Sandwalker scene occurs - it is at the period of the French landings, c. 150 years before 
>the events of the first and third novellas.

How do you know this? Is there any French spoken in "A Story"? I don't think so. The astronauts at the end offer 
to shake hands not kisses on the cheek.  I think you have piled a lot ofyour theory on unsubstantiated assumptions.

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