On dream travelers

Gerry Quinn · 12 Feb 2011, 15:28 · from 2011-February.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: Sat, 12 Feb 2011 15:28:01 -0000
Subject: (urth) On dream travelers
References: <SNT123-W2048240116F16E570F0FA2CFEE0 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <CFDF1813B0E5439FB2BE549A9F327C61@jill>

From: "Lee Berman" <severiansola at hotmail.com>

> That this is incomprehensible is a desired outcome by WOlfe. How else can 
> he describe
> something incomprehensible to the human mind except via such paradoxes?

I don't think the position of Yesod on generalised spacetime maps is 
intended to be inexplicable or paradoxical.

A lot of these arguments you make for inexplicability and paradox, in my 
view, Lee, trace back to your view of religion.  Fundamentally, you think 
religious belief is stupid.  Faced with the fact of a clearly intelligent 
author displaying religious belief, you find your beliefs contradictory. 
Unwilling to modify them, you decide that an intelligent believer must be 
engaged in some kind of self-hypnosis, choosing to believe contradictory 
things at once.  You therefore look for paradoxes and contradictions in 
Wolfe's books, and find many that are not there.

> I think it
> must be the same with dream travelers. They are corporeal but somehow also 
> incorporeal
> and James and Roy are each focusing on one side of the coin (Roy to the 
> exclusion that
> there is another side to the coin, if I understand correctly).

I think this is more a case of Wolfe being unable rather than unwilling to 
give a detailed physical model of dream travel.

> We are shown the reverse of dream travel. That is, Horn encounters 
> Neighbors who are
> dream travelling. He is able to shake one's hand, notice stiff bristly arm 
> hair....
> yet somehow he is unable to count their limbs or even heads.

I'm not sure he quite says that.  Note that there is no evidence that people 
on Urth cannot count the limbs or heads of Silk and his dream-travelling 
companions.

I think there's also a bit of a question mark over whether what the 
Neighbours do is the same thing as what Silkhorn can do with the aid of an 
inhuma.  It is related in some way, certainly. When I re-read BotSS I will 
try to look closely at these points.

- Gerry Quinn

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