FREE LIVE FREE

Michael Straight · 24 Sep 1997, 11:39 · from urth-v0004.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: Michael Straight <straight at email.unc.edu>
Subject: (urth) FREE LIVE FREE
Date: Wed, 24 Sep 1997 11:39:03
Message-ID: <urth-v0004-0320 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0004/0320.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable


[Posted from URTH, a mailing list about Gene Wolfe's New Sun and other work=
s]


Spoilers ho!
=20
I asked this question a few weeks ago, but perhaps I was so brief that no
one knew what I was talking about.
=20
Mr. Free tells the salesman that he hid the device "under a sign."  On the
last page, after the salesman has retrieved his son and rejoined the
others (who seem to have already been "improved" by the time machine), the
salesman sees the sign, and it seems that Wolfe intends readers to say
"Ah-ha! That's what Mr. Free meant."
=20
I did not say "Ah-ha!" and would like to very much.  What is the sign?
Any help would be received with gratitude.
=20
I really enjoyed this book and found it to be Wolfe's most humorous novel
(right up there with his robot detective stories, in my book).
=20
-Rostrum

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