Home Fires questions

Stephen Hoy · 19 Oct 2011, 19:59 · from 2011-October.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: stephenhoy at yahoo.com (Stephen Hoy)
Date: Wed, 19 Oct 2011 12:59:03 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: (urth) Home Fires questions
References: <4E5D0815.70902 at gmail.com> <4E8F7022.7020700 at verizon.net>
	<4E90C694.8000509 at verizon.net> <4E94E233.9010202 at verizon.net>
	<1318903379.24497.YahooMailNeo at web84403.mail.ac2.yahoo.com>
	<4E9D8E44.7030108 at verizon.net> 
Message-ID: <1319054343.23997.YahooMailNeo at web84414.mail.ac2.yahoo.com>

David Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net> wrote:

> > > At the formal dinner, his family reunites. All three have trouble recognizing one another (except when they don't). Two are known to be not entirely who they think they are. Surely the third is also not entirely who he is.
> > 
>?> I do wonder how
 any of the Blue family can recognize each other to any degree because they're all replacements/overlays. Still, somehow Chelle recognized her replacement mother at the airport while failing to recognize Skip. Clearly an important clue.
>?
>?Some notes about the beginning. First, it seems to begin with a dream, but the dream (Skip's memory of contracting with Chelle, looking in a mirror, recoiling) is followed by a reality that appears to be identical (he worries about Chelle, he looks in the mirror, recoils).
>?Second, Skip gets his own "yellow copy." He wonders if it's work-related, then tells himself he knows what it is, then tells himself it's something else. It turns out to be a message concerning Chelle. Pretty
 much all the narration here is immediately negated
 or contradicted. What was the other thing it could have been?

I agree about the dream-like start--a re-read of Chapter One feels like Skip is recovering from a recent mind-plant. Note also the details toward chapter's end, from the window conversion paragraph thru the tea garden paragraph--the open window and budding roses suggest an expansion of consciousness.?

Wolfe doesn't openly discuss the effects of superposing one mind onto another without first performing a wipe, but that seems to be what we're both considering. I think Skip has an overlay of some sort, possibly an agent's persona designated to watch over Chelle.

>?Odds/ends:

>?(1) Skip's hands are described as "wrinkled and old" in his dream. Is this merely his exaggerated worry that Chelle will find him too old? He's only in his late forties.
>?(2) the sentence "Five hundred." (This after something "seizes" Skip at the mirror and before he "shudders.") Years? Hours? Surely not noras.

Here's a thought...a year may not be a solar year.?

What if a year is actually ten hundred-days? Is there anything in Home Fires that might contradict this metrification? ?Twenty-two years of hundred-time equals about sixty of ours, which would help explain Chelle's failure to id Skip right off the ship, as well as Skip's early self-perception as "wrinkled and old." Also, it helps explain the confusion of Martha Ott, the disoriented elderly woman at the end of the book who sips tea with Chelle at Carrera's Cafe. On the down side, it's not a world-building premise I'd expect an author to obscure.?
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20111019/b5335570/attachment.htm>

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