Short Sun notes: Inhumi and their sources

Lee Berman · 10 Jul 2013, 14:23 · from 2013-July.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: Wed, 10 Jul 2013 10:23:06 -0400
Subject: (urth) Short Sun notes: Inhumi and their sources
Message-ID: <BLU175-W3094FE1001952C84EF3BEACF7A0 at phx.gbl>

>Andrew Mason: I suspect that for each featured inhumu/a we are meant to be able to work
>out who their source is.

I find the blended identities found within inhumi to be very confusing. Likewise for the
merged identities within other characters like Babbie, Oreb, Pig, Kypris/Hyacynth, etc. I 
appreciate and admire your fortitude in trying to map these out.

I've been lazy, and content to take a broad-based interpretation of all that. For the inhumi 
I find them to be Wolfean allegory on the presence of blood-sucking parasites among us; the 
liars and criminals and drug addicts who only take from society without contributing.

The conflation of inhumi with Horn's children and surrogate children seems a bit like the
Shakespearean lament: "how sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child".
Since I think only Number 5 and Severian rival Horn as a Gene Wolfe literary avatar, I 
suspect there is masked autobiography going on here as well as a general statement on 
humanity and the difficulties of parenthood.

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