Innocents Aboard

Antonin Scriabin · 15 Jul 2014, 12:35 · from 2014-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: kierkegaurdian at gmail.com (Antonin Scriabin)
Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2014 08:35:37 -0400
Subject: (urth) Innocents Aboard
In-Reply-To: <CAGB0RZ5Zy8ZMa8xJZjzpbjBX0mGcAkevTECfMmFW80hUXy7VNQ at mail.gmail.com>
References: <CAM0v-i6C17-q-o3EpDqncdsDLhzGyiRoBb4qm-rtVn+5bkU1zQ at mail.gmail.com>
	<CAM0v-i4O7-yC1mkbzh2N2ZpQX0E5HGDP91iDDMXR91HQ6vkEhg at mail.gmail.com>
	<CAGB0RZ5Zy8ZMa8xJZjzpbjBX0mGcAkevTECfMmFW80hUXy7VNQ at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <CAM0v-i4Eoik=aE4PtT3-T9fKYCivnYdhM6P6+yJ-TfdLH8YU1w at mail.gmail.com>

Here it is:

"You took him, as you promised, whole and entire.  I have no grounds for
complaint upon that score, or indeed upon any.  And I feel certain he met
his well-deserved death firmly convinced that he was in the grip of demons,
or some such thing, which I find enormously satisfying."

We get very little (even by Wolfe standards) description of the
maybe-demons.  All we really know is they have wings and green eyes.  I'm
wondering if they aren't some kind of alien ... Ty seems to think it is
somewhat funny that his brother-in-law will have thought he was being
attacked by demons.  Can we take this to mean there is no supernatural
element at all?  Ty clearly has a good idea of what they are, and he
doesn't think they're demons.

I wonder also about the Coleman lantern at the end, strung up in a tree to
flicker when "signal frequencies" change.  It's not uncommon in
American-myth for alien spaceships (or the beings themselves) to mess with
electronics and gadgets of all kinds, when close.

Alien abduction classically is "whole and entire" as well, but this doesn't
mesh with the disemboweling of Nicollete or the headless cat, unless these
are "mutilated cow" events.

On Tue, Jul 15, 2014 at 4:20 AM, Daniel Otto Jack Petersen <
danielottojackpetersen at gmail.com> wrote:

> One of my favourite stories by Wolfe:  I've often wondered about the
> creature.  As I recall, some character says, laughingly, that its victim
> probably *thought* it was a devil or demon - implying that this wasn't at
> all the case.
>
> I wondered if it was some sort of avenging angel (think of the monstrous
> seraphim and cherubim of Hebrew scripture - Wolfe references the latter to
> great effect in another story in this collection, as he also does in
> 'Quadrifons' from Long and Short Suns).
>
> I also wondered if it was a gryphon or sphinx or some other being from
> mythology.
>
> (I've also never been able to figure out what in the world is a
> 'friendship light' is.)
>
> -DOJP
>
>
> On Tue, Jul 15, 2014 at 2:43 AM, Antonin Scriabin <
> kierkegaurdian at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Working my way through this collection, and checked the Wiki for clues
>> pertaining to "The Friendship Light". If one of you threw in the quip about
>> the Star Child from 2001, thanks for the laugh!
>>
>> As for the story itself, is there a type of demon / vampire from any
>> mythology that spurns the heads of its victims? This behavior reminds me of
>> certain cats I've known, who will leave snake and mouse heads untouched and
>> eat a good portion of the rest.
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Urth Mailing List
>> To post, write urth at urth.net
>> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Daniel Otto Jack Petersen
>
> _______________________________________________
> Urth Mailing List
> To post, write urth at urth.net
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20140715/610a695f/attachment.htm>

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