Science and Miracles

Nicholas Gevers · 02 Nov 1999, 11:34 · from urth-v0028.mbox · original

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: =?iso-8859-1?q?Nicholas=20Gevers?= <vermoulian at yahoo.com>
Subject: (urth) Science and Miracles
Date: Tue, 2 Nov 1999 11:34:11
Message-ID: <urth-v0028-0342 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0028/0342.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

I agree with other parties to our debate that the
ever-present possibility of scientific explanations
for events enriches NEW SUN, lending it rigour,
speculative depth, and metaphorical power. But as LONG
SUN makes clear, it is sometimes the possibility of a
miraculous explanation that is the most effective
literary device in Wolfe's work. I think that Wolfe at
times intentionally misleads his readers into byways
of scientific explication, in effect challenging them
to see the wood for the trees, the Word for the World;
when they fail to find secular explanations, or
contrive ones that are trivial and unsatisfactory,
they must perforce acknowledge the supremacy of the
miraculous.=20

Another point: a miraculous explanation for a textual
incident doesn't entail capitulation to the
intellectually slack fluffiness of genre Fantasy
plotting. Wolfe intends us to understand supernatural
events as ultimately purposeful Divine interventions
or concessions, not as the random conjurings of elves
and wizards.

=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Bid and sell for free at http://auctions.yahoo.com

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

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