Babbiehorn?: Was: a sincere question mostly for roy

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes · 17 Nov 2011, 18:55 · 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: danldo at gmail.com (Dan'l Danehy-Oakes)
Date: Thu, 17 Nov 2011 10:55:20 -0800
Subject: (urth) Babbiehorn?: Was: a sincere question mostly for roy
In-Reply-To: <SNT123-W3383215848D6891960AC99CFC70 at phx.gbl>
References: <SNT123-W3383215848D6891960AC99CFC70 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <CAJ8=rthypkeab5AWN=YMjy+pj1gCQ97_0Xix4vipCBiPLGzgGA at mail.gmail.com>

Lee Berman wrote:

> But in SF/Fantasy and most especially in the work of Gene Wolfe, metaphors take on a
> much greater dose of reality than they do in fiction of the real world.

Yes. Delany suggests that one of the discursive powers of SF is to
literalize metaphors -- i.e., "her world exploded," which would be a
muzzy metaphor in mimetic fiction, in SF might well mean that a planet
belonging to someone blowed up real good. This literalization, he
suggests, simultaneously closes a space for discussion of
subjective/psychological topics and opens one for
objective/physical/economic topics.

SF also allows possible literal meanings impossible in MF: Delany
suggests, for example, "He turned on his left side." A restless
sleeper? Or, in SF, did someone throw a switch?

So, yes, there is _something_ going on with the trees and lianas and
Neighbors and Inhumi, and it's _probably_ something more (or at least
"other") than a metaphor. I'm still not sold on the "Neighbors are
Trees" theory or the "Horn died in the pit and a Neighbor replaced
him" theory, but there's sure something going on here.

-- 
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes

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