the prime calcula/his citadel and other quotes

Gerry Quinn · 19 Jan 2011, 02:27 · 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: gerryq at indigo.ie (Gerry Quinn)
Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2011 02:27:23 -0000
Subject: (urth) the prime calcula/his citadel and other quotes
References: <609292.90378.qm at web161801.mail.bf1.yahoo.com><00c201cbb68c$7229a680$b5cf4a0c@rclackey>	<4D34B7A5.3060607 at gmail.com><004901cbb6f6$cc7327a0$7bd04a0c@rclackey>	<4D358382.8020301 at gmail.com><BC6150592C554CC9AB4637B073047F5D@jill>	<4D361381.9030603 at gmail.com><AA17E2BBFA234D198BDD6CB0BCB34938@jill>	<4D362F78.5040301 at gmail.com><13D936C085A441C785BDFB8877B2AB0E@jill>
	<4D363D57.6090902 at gmail.com>
Message-ID: <58C03303FF2E4E93B46D58A1A0A1E7C9@jill>

From: "James Wynn" <crushtv at gmail.com>
> Gerry Quinn wrote:-
>>James Wynn:

>>> That's the way _all_ the sleepers remembered the Typhon family-- as 
>>> gods. The sleepers had no real advantage over the wakers.
>>
>> Could you be more specific, please?  How does Mamelta indicate that?
>
> ??? Have you read The Book of the Short Sun?
> I'll ask again, do you think Mamelta was unique in not having her memory 
> messed with?

We're not talking about the Book of the Short Sun, and anyway Mamelta isn't 
in it.  Anyway, Rigoglio remembered Typhon too, and lots of stuff about him. 
Have you some information that he specifically didn't remember Typhon's 
face?

Both Typhon and Mamelta remembered stuff about their personal lives, even 
though we are told that that is what the surgeons tried to partially 
eradicate.  And they both remembered the Monarch.

>> Cilinia too, indeed.  But tell me, so, that I may learn to appreciate 
>> Wolfe at your level - how do you explain Echidna's apparently total lack 
>> of acknowledgement that she was speaking to a clone of Typhon while she 
>> went on about various other unrelated matters?
>
> Why would she care? Silk was not Typhon. Why would she care that he looked 
> like Typhon? What in the book makes you think she would be sentimental 
> about a clone of Typhon or anyone else? She cared about what use she could 
> put people to and that's it.

That's clearly untrue - we know, for example, that she had a hangup about 
sexual purity.  It was Echidna who insisted that only virgins should be able 
to see the gods.  On the whole, though, we don't know all that much about 
Echidna's personality.

> I can't imagine what you would have wanted her to say. You expect her say 
> "Lo! The image of my cursed husband whom I have slain. Yet he continues to 
> vex me in your flesh." That's an ER Burroughs novel, not Wolfe.

Maybe Burroughs would have done it that way, and maybe Wolfe would have done 
it another way.  But any author worth his salt would have dealt with this 
obvious point in some way.  Even if the author wanted Echidna to say 
nothing, he would have slipped in a clue to the effect that she recognised 
him.  I think Wolfe would consider it very 'lame' to ignore such a matter 
(as would Burroughs).

But anyway - how much of the text do you need to ignore to press your case 
that Silk is a clone of Typhon?  The number of people - and gods - who would 
have been expected to be familiar with the faces of both is absurdly high, 
and while some of them might have remained silent or not known for one 
reason or another, there is absolutely no way half the characters of Book of 
the Long Sun (including Silk and Pas, their friends and enemies, and many 
who had no axe to grind either way) could have been part of some grand 
conspiracy which makes no sense and is never even hinted at in the text!

- Gerry Quinn

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