Babbiehorn?: Was: a sincere question mostly for roy

Gerry Quinn · 16 Nov 2011, 16:36 · from 2011-November.txt.gz

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From: gerry at bindweed.com (Gerry Quinn)
Date: Wed, 16 Nov 2011 16:36:32 -0000
Subject: (urth) Babbiehorn?: Was: a sincere question mostly for roy
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From: James Wynn 

> Gerry Quinn wrote:
> > This may seem a minor nit, but the Mucor who stands over Silk is described as ?skeletally thin?.  On Blue 
> > Horn notes that she is still thin, but not as thin as she was.  

> It's certainly worth bringing up, but it is hardly a deal breaker.

I agree.

> > [even if] the Rajan can travel in time, it?s surely a stretch that he can grab people 
> > who are psychically travelling in some other mode, and bring them back 
> > in time.  Furthermore, how would Mucor get back to her own time? 


> How does anyone get back during astral travel? They wake up.
But does Mucor go to sleep when initiating her brand of out-of-body travel?
  > > again, an argument of a kind you dislike: but if Wolfe wanted to 
  > > write in these super-hidden explanations and leave subtle clues, 
  > > he had a great opportunity to indicate that the Mucor Silk sees 
  > > here is not so thin as usual.  

> Yeah. I really really hate this kind of argument. It's worse than lazy. It's an 
> argument someone would only reasonably make if they had never read a 
> Wolfe novel. 

That statement is truly absurd, as I am making it, having read many.  And I consider it a strong argument, because I respect Wolfe?s talents as a writer to much to believe he would make such elementary blunders (Mucor isn?t really a problem as it?s just one incident, but I think the gravity thing is a good example of something that can be totally ruled out by this argument.)

> When you can point to the clear, textual explanation of what
>  is happening with the Horn-Babbie confabulation, or how the Rajan gains 
> the power of dream-travel, or how the Rajan ended up in the grandmother's 
> tale, or who is the barnacled man Horn encounters, or the nature of 
> Seawrack, or what the shattered glass structure is that Horn and Seawrack 
> encountered on the island, or  why Silk decided that he and Sand were 
> "brothers" in some sense based on the vague similarity of their names...
> then you will certainly have cause to argue "Well, if that's what Wolfe
>  intended, then why didn't he just *say* so?"

This is a completely different situation.  In your examples we have Wolfe putting in obvious anomalies that need clearing up.  In the examples I?m talking about, the anomalies are absent where, if a (generally unlikely) theory were valid, they would be expected to be present.

- Gerry Quinn
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