silk, the dancing toy, gods in the tunnels

Gerry Quinn · 27 Aug 2013, 11:36 · from 2013-August.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: gerry at bindweed.com (Gerry Quinn)
Date: Tue, 27 Aug 2013 12:36:40 +0100
Subject: (urth) silk, the dancing toy, gods in the tunnels
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From: Marc Aramini

> There is an odd kind of deciphering in long sun where Wolfe just says 
> things
> outright (kypris is hyacinth is mamelta is chenille is mother) (because 
> they
> are all literally possessed by kypris or are her physically, and she is 
> his real
> mother) and I take the Gods in the tunnels as another one of those 
> instances
> of just literal statement.  There are gods in the tunnels.

If I recall correctly, Silk is falling asleep when that occurs to me.  They 
are all embodiments of Woman - that is how I see it.  I don't think it makes 
any sense literally to make them the same person.  We know that on Urth 
Mamelta was a computer technician of no special importance, for a start, and 
while we could invent some relationship between her and the Urthly Kypris, 
it seems like it would be strained.

As for the gods of the tunnels, I see it as a blasphemous joke that would be 
plausible in real life.  'Dog' is 'god' written backward, after all.  The 
dogs ARE the lords of the tunnels.  And they eat the human 'sacrifices' that 
are placed there.

I think if you interpret everything as a coded message from the author to 
the readers, there is no room for the characters to have life.  And Wolfe's 
characters are important to him.  They aren't intended to be just ciphers.

- Gerry Quinn

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