Agia's Weapons

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes · 21 Dec 2011, 16:43 · from 2011-December.txt.gz

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From: danldo at gmail.com (Dan'l Danehy-Oakes)
Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2011 08:43:23 -0800
Subject: (urth) Agia's Weapons
In-Reply-To: <SNT123-W493665E916D7D55EF777FFCFA50 at phx.gbl>
References: <SNT123-W493665E916D7D55EF777FFCFA50 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <CAJ8=rtiboJH2qMvMBbqbWv+TJzubCBPcoaiBWWnWN2s0ykxAuw at mail.gmail.com>

Lee Berman wrote:

> I am proposing that what WOlfe has done is take one (very large) character and
> split it into various sub-characters. The synecdoche of this is Tzadkiel who appears in guises
> as varied as hairy blob, monkey, troglodyte, adonis-man, giant serious angel and little laughing
> fairy. Compared to that, are Inire and Hethor (and others) really so different?

The problem here is that you're trying to solve a puzzle in tBotNS
with information that only became available in tUotNS. Wolfe is a
deeply puzzling writer, but he deploys his clues fairly, and when he
wrote tBotNS he had no intention of writing tUotNS - it was not yet a
gleam in David Hartwell's eye. Thus, there would be no way for a
reader to make this analogy; the _Book_ proper has no such
transformations in it (that I recall).

I don't buy it.

-- 
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes

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