FREE LIVE FREE (spoilers)

adam louis stephanides · 30 Sep 1997, 15:19 · 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: adam louis stephanides <astephan at students.uiuc.edu>
Subject: (urth) FREE LIVE FREE (spoilers)
Date: Tue, 30 Sep 1997 15:19:05
Message-ID: <urth-v0004-0327 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0004/0327.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]

This is the first time I've posted to this list, but I've
enjoyed lurking a lot.  As long as FLF is being discussed,=20
I'll repeat some questions I posted to rasfw a year ago and=20
never got answers to (although it being that long since I
last read the book, the answers may not mean much to
me now):

1) Why are there two Whittens (in addition to "Ben Free")
in 1983?  The younger Whitten (the man in the duffle coat)
is there on his second trip with the gizmo for the government.
What is the older Whitten doing there?

2) When "Ben Free" reappears on January 14, 1983, where did
he come from?  He didn't come from the frontier, because he
left the frontier for the last time before he hid the gizmo
in the wall, and that was presumably before January 14, 1983.

3) A minor point, but in Chapter 52 the witch tells the others
that "Today I defrauded a certain one, the namesake of one who
possesses much authority, below."  Is there a demon named
McAlister?  Or is there some joke regarding McAlister's first
name (which I don't remember ever being stated) which I missed?
Or did she defraud somebody else that day?  (Actually I vaguely
recall getting an answer to this one, but I don't remember
what it was, and I don't think I was satisfied by it.)

--Adam

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