Inhumi secret

Lee Berman · 29 Nov 2012, 16:25 · from 2012-November.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: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee Berman)
Date: Thu, 29 Nov 2012 11:25:24 -0500
Subject: (urth) Inhumi secret
Message-ID: <SNT123-W50854A016036BCB0A4646FCF5C0 at phx.gbl>

>David Stockhoff: Perhaps the Neighbors were somewhat better at it than we would be. 
>They did after all gather enough "political will" to leave Blue and Green entirely. 
>I don't see humans doing even that much.

I agree with this. I get the sense that the Neighbors, though previously highly susceptible
to the evil of Inhumi are now immune to them. Perhaps this is related to the fact that they no 
longer exist entirely in our physical, material plane 

>Actually, I think they see a potential for good in us that we don't. 
>They may inflate it somewhat because it represents a grave danger to them. But they 
>are smart enough to not take it for granted---

I think this general direction of thinking might get to the heart not only of Short Sun but 
perhaps the whole Sun series. I've long gotten the sense that Wolfe is depicting a kind of
spiritual progression across the 12 books. 

I'll guess Green is the starting point and the Edenic associations to it support that. Urth
and The Whorl, war-torn and ruled by superhuman pagan gods, is probably the next stage in 
the progression. Ushas and Blue would be next; the Flooding somehow keeps the rule of the
giant gods at a more manageable level?

As seems to be Wolfe's wont, he doesn't directly address the impact of Christ's arrival in his
fiction. But advanced beings like the hierotypes, The Green Man and Neighbors would seem to 
illustrate what the next stage beyond our own current status might be.

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