Just discovered this list

Gerry Quinn · 09 Nov 2013, 11:42 · from 2013-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: gerry at bindweed.com (Gerry Quinn)
Date: Sat, 9 Nov 2013 11:42:45 -0000
Subject: (urth) Just discovered this list
In-Reply-To: <CAFXcBQ9+4B8bOuP-WrQ0rpZzahCUiw5OL98feMBDkki6PxUtvw at mail.gmail.com>
References: <CAFXcBQ9+4B8bOuP-WrQ0rpZzahCUiw5OL98feMBDkki6PxUtvw at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <DC66B25E71464906B06C783017C714DC@Rover>

From: Darrell Burgan

> I've read the New Sun books twice, the Long Sun once and Short Sun twice,
>  and am about to embark on my third reading of New Sun. I just cannot get
> enough of Gene Wolfe. He makes me think.

Welcome!

> Sorry if this is an obvious question, but I'll pose it anyway. Is there 
> any
> symbolic or literal relationship between Seawrack of Short Sun and Mamelta
> of Long Sun? After all, Mamelta told Silk they would one day be lovers, 
> and
>  then was apparently eaten by a giant fish before any such thing happened 
> ...

I don't recall anyone coming up with this one before!

My interpretation is that it was Mucor saying this, while she possessed 
Mamelta.  It would not surprise me if Mucor were prepared to make love in 
somebody else's body, such as Mamelta's, although perhaps she was just 
fantasising without any particular intent.

As for Mamelta, we do hear her story - it appears she was a middle-class 
computer programmer conscripted to go onto the Whorl.  One can make up 
reasons why she might have been Silk's biological mother, but if Wolfe 
wanted to hint that she was also needed as an egg-donor, say, which could 
make such a theory far more plausible, he easily could have.

So I think she was mainly a walk-on character who got eaten by a fish.

- Gerry Quinn

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