Gummed-Up Works or Got Lives?

Gerry Quinn · 15 Dec 2011, 22:57 · 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: Thu, 15 Dec 2011 22:57:54 -0000
Subject: (urth) Gummed-Up Works or Got Lives?
In-Reply-To: <CAJ8=rtjY=Vw=xuR0D0mtusmUzKq5hSbp5mOOUhuX9ugQ4gsWfA at mail.gmail.com>
References: <SNT123-W50A9FF8908A2C4EB5FA2CACFA30 at phx.gbl><37C4859FAD55407DBA8779047C8C609B@Rover>
	<CAJ8=rtjY=Vw=xuR0D0mtusmUzKq5hSbp5mOOUhuX9ugQ4gsWfA at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <5292EBB8EB22429796ED409817105354@Rover>



From: Dan'l Danehy-Oakes 

> Gerry Quinn wrote:

> > You said: ?a sword, a giant, a sleeping beauty, magic, palaces?.  But none
> > of those are really much like their fairy-tale counterparts.  The sword has
> > no magic powers.  Baldanders, fair enough, Severian even fights him in his
> > castle, though not for gold.  Dorcas isn?t really a sleeping beauty ? we
> > don?t know she was dead until she is already leaving the narrative.  Magic
> > is tech.  Palaces... the House Absolute is underground.
>
> > What we have learned of these things from fairy-tales doesn?t really help us
> > here.  They don?t mirror their fairy-tale counterparts.  BotNS really isn?t
> > a fairy-tale in any strong sense.  Or so it seems to me.
>
> > Conversely, understanding magic as technology does help us see what?s going
> > on.

> Contraconversely, understanding technology as magic, a la Clarke's
> Third Law, _also_ helps us see what's going on. Wolfe goes out of his
> way to provide a pseudoscientific explanation for at least some of
> Severian's miracles; but does anybody really believe that they are
> _not_ miracles? The clue for this is near the beginning of CLAW, where
> it is observed that the real miracle is that the laws of the Universe
> are such that the Cathedral of the Pelerines will rise
> non-miraculously: Wolfe is reminding us that there will always be a
> way to "explain away" a miracle ... but that miracles happen,
> nonetheless. (This is also my understanding of Dr Crane's
> "explanation" of Silk's enlightenment, btw: plausible bullshit.)

> tBotNS is indeed a fairy story, a once-upon-a-time whisking away of
> the reader to a land where miracles happen, giants (who somehow
> resembles Queequeg...) battle heroes, the dead walk, and monarchs live
> in invisible palaces. (Even the invisible palace hides an invisible
> palace!) If it questions the assumptions of the fairy story, and
> especially the happy ending, well so too does it question the
> assumptions of classic science fantasy: and we cannot understand that
> questioning unless we understand "what we have learned of these things
> from fairy-tales."

You are right about technology as magic, but I don?t think that BotNS maps well onto fairy stories.  Not every story containing magic is a fairy story, or a sword and sorcery tale, or any particular genre of magical tale.  I would see a typical fairy story as largely about personality (albeit often clinically insane personalities).   A dysfunctional family is frequently the main driver of the plot.  Baldanders is not so bad a fit as a fairy tale giant, but I don?t really see too many fairy tale tropes in BotNS.  

Even the fairies themselves don?t seem evident on Urth, and that is unusual for Wolfe.  You might find fairies or fairy-like beings on Blue, or even on the Whorl - and perhaps they will return to Ushas - but on Urth they have been crushed under the weight of ages.  There are new monsters, but no real fairies or ghosts.  Anything even vaguely close is a consequence of technology or physics.

- Gerry Quinn


   


 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20111215/272fb0d6/attachment.htm>

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