the prime calcula/his citadel and other quotes

Gerry Quinn · 20 Jan 2011, 01:55 · 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: Thu, 20 Jan 2011 01:55:41 -0000
Subject: (urth) the prime calcula/his citadel and other quotes
References: <SNT123-W49D18F1B4B79FF96FF110DCFF60 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <4FEA8AC7FEBF4929B84CF48D733327EC@jill>


From: "Lee Berman" <severiansola at hotmail.com>
>>Gerry Quinn:
>>You forget that people like Kypris and Echidna knew him intimately, and
>>Mamelta and Rigoglio knew him recently (in their terms). And Silk isn't 
>>just a random guy,
>>the guy on the Whorl most likely to win a Typhon lookalike contest.  He's 
>>the main
>>character.
>
> Heh. Just because Silk is "the main character" for us readers does not 
> mean he is the main
> character in every character's life. There were many unmentioned cities on 
> the whorl. Who
> knows how many copies of Whorl gods were doing who knows what in each of 
> them. And why would
> Mamelta have any special knowledge of what Typhon looked like (assuming as 
> you do, that she is
> not Kypris)? Paintings and rock carving are hardly accurate enough 
> renditions to warrant a swoon
> of recognition in encountering a flesh and blood version of Typhon.

Molpe (in her original form) danced through her dreams.  The Monarch and his 
family were the most important thing in the lives of Mamelta and her 
contemporaries on Urth.

And literature does not follow the rules of life as you well know.  You have 
talked about Checkov's guin, but you misapply it.  A clone of Typhon is a 
great example of a Checkov gun, though -  the clone must be recognisable, or 
the author must tell us why.

Neither case applies here, therefore Silk is not a clone of Typhon.

- Gerry Quinn

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