Reptiles

Mark Millman · 07 Jan 2011, 18:11 · 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: markjmillman at gmail.com (Mark Millman)
Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2011 13:11:12 -0500
Subject: (urth) Reptiles
In-Reply-To: <SNT123-W55E3B97A0F4F7F82F3C33CCF0B0 at phx.gbl>
References: <SNT123-W55E3B97A0F4F7F82F3C33CCF0B0 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <AANLkTi=665_bPNXgbzXwu8Jcu0C56f2z84C5ifAU0kOs at mail.gmail.com>

Dear Mr. Berman,

On Friday 7 January 2010, you wrote:

>> Jerry Friedman: it's not
>> the inhumi's nature that's
>> reptilian; it's their appear-
>> ance.  They're nothing
>> like Earth reptiles in their
>> behavior. ?And I see no
>> discrepancy between
>> reptilian appearance and
>> external fertilization. ?I
>> see no reason evolution
>> on Blue-Green should
>> have gone the same way
>> it did on Earth, no reason
>> we have to adjust our
>> ideas about them when
>> we learn about their fer-
>> tilization or even if they
>> have some mysterious
>> essential link to trees
>> and vines.
>
> I think we have another example of
> personal experience biasing inter-
> pretation. For me, being a reptile
> MEANS internal fertilization and ter-
> restrial eggs. That was their major
> evolutionary adaptation, allowing
> vertebrates to colonize the land and
> join their plant and insect cousins
> there.
>
> For me it is as though Gene WOlfe
> spent three books noting the bird-
> like appearance of Inhumi and then
> at the end reveals- they have no
> wings. That would have to be a sig-
> nificant solution to some series
> mystery, because an assumption
> of wings is something (I think) we
> all share with regard to birds.
>
> I don't know if Gene Wolfe shares
> my perception that internal fertiliza-
> tion is an essential part of being a
> reptile or whether he just thinks of
> them as being scaly, creepy things.
> I can't know. On the one hand he is
> scientific and detail oriented. On the
> other hand he seems to have con-
> flated monkeys and apes in a cou-
> ple spots in his work. (a baboon is
> big, but definitely a monkey).
>
> I lean toward Wolfe recognizing the
> essentiality of reptilian internal fer-
> tilization because it fits patterns I
> keep seeing. One is the increasing
> simplicity of their origin...
>
> But the other may even more cen-
> tral...Wolfe is saying, at the end,
> that shapeshifting Inhumi need a
> body of surface water to reproduce.
> In a 12 book series in which fish
> and flooding seem to be recurring
> themes, I think this is likely to be
> a significant revelation.

And later, you also wrote:

> When I read Robinson Crusoe or
> some other old book and a charac-
> ter remarks, "the ape didst gnaw
> upon its own tail", I can appreciate
> the archaic use of the word. And I
> think maybe Wolfe was going for
> that sort of usage to go along with
> his other archaic terms and names
> rather than making a linnaean error.

In that case, it may interest you to know that, at roughly the same
time that the term "ape" comprised large monkeys such as baboons, the
term "reptile" comprised amphibians--which typically have externally
fertilized eggs that require open water.

Best,

Mark Millman

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