Gummed-Up Works or Got Lives?

Gerry Quinn · 14 Dec 2011, 13:50 · from 2011-December.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: gerry at bindweed.com (Gerry Quinn)
Date: Wed, 14 Dec 2011 13:50:04 -0000
Subject: (urth) Gummed-Up Works or Got Lives?
In-Reply-To: <4EE8A555.1050307 at gmail.com>
References: <20111213164613.30232.qmail at server281.com><CAM0v-i6AOcERnP_dUq7jZmhEBcNyMvXKH9VoGO2oGSEMdZHiTw at mail.gmail.com><871FD0B988794812B029032B38091DA0@Rover><CADQR0GqCOY7VyWYh=MUAmr7sv7Y2SyBMmb2bQG6YBVTR8H1ZeQ at mail.gmail.com><CAGB0RZ6sFDgYVmHfXA7LjRPEDFpAz6yOEW4icGQEFORDaLOWaQ at mail.gmail.com><CADQR0Go5Wc0Dd3damtEZCyphG6ntP6dz+F-QmqNdY0OsKJBu5Q at mail.gmail.com><CAGB0RZ6gec6H1rFT-1KpkC9nh2uz2ZUQq_mWvrrDZZbgyU4UZA at mail.gmail.com><CADQR0GoLcEcnittL1k35dX8S9y9dvkhmuLrHBynB8u3REDw5Yg at mail.gmail.com><CAGB0RZ4SOgZ4aDtRCqYj_1kEi+84_TLK_MYEjc-ZgTd0n28jtA at mail.gmail.com><4EE88878.8030609 at gmail.com><CAGB0RZ5FAYiGdeTujWFyAX1A37Q=YDuvZbqfuiJmcNjEP5tD1A at mail.gmail.com><4EE89815.3020908 at gmail.com><CAGB0RZ6f-0Wh7gdfWrwO3z++zZrt2gfHSdcdZM53-RxqkR50nw at mail.gmail.com>
	<4EE8A555.1050307 at gmail.com>
Message-ID: <5EBE7F313EEB4254A33C02526701808E@Rover>

From: Ant?nio Pedro Marques 

> Curious bit here: I've never got the 's&s' feeling from any of the Sun 
> books, not even NS. 

Same here.  If you?ve read Vance (say) beforehand, you?ll know what?s going on (of course in _The Dying Earth_ magic did rather dominate tech, but at the same time the environment is recognisable).  And Wolfe tells us very quickly anyway in the graveyard scene, where ?there was a a shot? and we are instantly informed that Vodalus is using some kind of energy pistol. 

It?s not really about the tech versus magic thing anyway, so much as the foregrounding of a way of thinking about the world.  Vance?s magic is a kind of technology, even in Lyonesse.  Conversely, Moorcock can go on all he wants about power rings or whatever, but he?s still writing swords and sorcery.

I guess Wolfe might leave an option for the Increate or his chief minions to interfere with the physical underpinnings of the world ? but for all lesser beings at least, magic is a name for technologies we don;t understand.  The Cumaean says as much.

- Gerry Quinn

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20111214/a9a16938/attachment.htm>

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