Levels of meaning (was Re: Green Is Urth Redux)

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes · 12 Jan 2011, 17:55 · from 2011-January.txt.gz

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From: danldo at gmail.com (Dan'l Danehy-Oakes)
Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2011 09:55:56 -0800
Subject: (urth) Levels of meaning (was Re:  Green Is Urth Redux)
Message-ID: <AANLkTikLhvvRco8YLhhaOT0Ac9WJPuRzrWS1QU9O3uVe at mail.gmail.com>

Lee Berman wrote:

> I preferred Wolfe's
> explanation of how the Alzabo was a metaphor for his former mega-corp employer, Procter and Gamble. For
> me that's where the true human understanding of the *meaning* of the text is found)

Oh, aye. We're in agreement there; I was just tweaking this whole
silly argument about whether there are domes on Lune or what. What
really matters is that Lune stands green in the sky as a symbol of
man's past engineering glory, to which Vodalus foolishly thinks he can
restore the world. It is a doubled symbol of decadance: the
technological decadance that has fallen so far from the ability to do
such things; and the moral decadance that said "just because we can,
we should."

Agreed also that Wolfe's not going to let a hard-science difficulty
stand in the way of a cool story point. (The alzabo itself is patently
ridiculous on a hard-science basis, but chilling as hell as a monster
and neat as a symbol of being devoured by The Machine.) But, he does
take pains to make a lot of his story at least surface-plausible.
(Well, maybe the alzabo isn't completely ridiculous: if it isn't a
native animal of some far world, but bioengineered by humans to
produce the analeptic...)

-- 
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes

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