Father Inire as Dionysus

Lee Berman · 22 Oct 2011, 16:37 · 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: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee Berman)
Date: Sat, 22 Oct 2011 12:37:56 -0400
Subject: (urth) Father Inire as Dionysus
Message-ID: <SNT123-W48230D3E82FED3A6AA525FCFE90 at phx.gbl>

>Jeff Wilson: Talos' cosmic knowledge could easily have come from FB&O's
>wisdom-spreading audiences with Baldanders. His society knowledge can as
>easily have come from his association with the upper classes as a popular
>traveling entertainer, and perhaps as a keen eavesdropper endowed with
>foxlike senses.

Great post Jeff. Yes, it could have.

Here's the thing for me- We have the mystery of Dr. Talos' knowledge. It is

a mystery because it is not explained and I think we are supposed to figure 

it out. We have competing theories: 1. he is a keen eavesdropper and 2. He

is really a version of the mysterious Father Inire.

If this was the real world, I think #1 is the better explanation. It is plain

and simple and thus better via Occam's principle. But this is a work of fantastical

fiction and for me, the fantastical #2 solution to a mystery is simply more fun.

WOlfe gives us the mystery of a flying cathedral and later gives us the pedestrian

answer that it is simply a big tent flying like a hot air balloon. So there are

pedestrian answers to some mysteries. It's just that he provides the answer to

that one. The mysteries we are supposed to figure out for ourselves ought to 

have cool, interesting solutions, I think. If we are willing to put the thought

into solving his mysteries wouldn't he want to reward us rather than provide a yawn?

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