vanished people=Hieros

Marc Aramini · 08 Nov 2011, 12:50 · from 2011-November.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: marcaramini at yahoo.com (Marc Aramini)
Date: Tue, 8 Nov 2011 04:50:23 -0800 (PST)
Subject: (urth) vanished people=Hieros
In-Reply-To: <4EB91A13.5000300 at gmail.com>
Message-ID: <1320756623.49427.YahooMailClassic at web161806.mail.bf1.yahoo.com>

--- On Tue, 11/8/11, Ant?nio Pedro Marques <entonio at gmail.com> wrote:

> > 
> Nessus is of cyclopean size, but it has 'moved' along time.
> The abandoned parts, iiuc, largely crumble to pieces after a
> while. The underground, iiuc, is made of layers upon layers
> of ancient buildings.
> 
> We don't know the size of the City of the Inhumi, other
> than it's large and it's got some standing towers.
> 
> They look similar because both are large cities, in fact
> the only proper planetary 'modern' cities the narrator
> knows. You can certainly say a relationship between them is
> possible, but from there to a pretty good mapping there's a
> distance. These are just not enough data.
> _______________________________________________

So that canted tower that they expected to "save them" because it was a stripped rocket ship didn't do it for you with the round port windows?  

It's the conglomeration of comparisons.  Yes, the city of the inhumi reminding the rajan of Urth (or vice versa) is hinted at more than twice, and when introspective the narrator thinks things like, I had to stop and think about what I had really just said - because he knows he is not making the correct connection.

I don't know what kind of concrete evidence you want - wolfe started out with the intention of writing  a story where the didactic purpose was on top but the who what when where why and how (main character, setting, time) would be hidden and obscure without deeper level analysis.

What similarity would satisfy you beyond doubt? That is not in the text because it can't be obvious; Wolfe wanted to obscure all the normally easily answerable questios here through the device of a narrator [SILK after OBW with only the barest trace of Horn] who is in denial about what has happened to himself, what has happened to his wife, and what has happened to his species.  

So I can't prove it but all the comparisons and hints and that big huge stripped rocket tower with round port windows sure create a similar image; I can't do any more with that so let's just say you don't find the evidence compelling, but that doesn't mean the relationship is not hinted at.

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