one-two-three for me, revised

William H. Ansley · 17 Jan 2000, 23:02 · from urth-v0028.mbox · original

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From: "William H. Ansley" <wansley at warwick.net>
Subject: Re: (urth) one-two-three for me, revised
Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2000 23:02:49
Message-ID: <urth-v0028-0698 at digest.urth.net>
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>I don't find Nicholas Gevers attempts to find a link between "One-Two-Three
>for Me" and "And When They Appear" to be convincing. If there is another
>story that will help to explain "One-Two-Three for Me," we will have to
>look for it outside of _Strange Travelers_. Another story that came to my
>mind is "The Most Beautiful Woman on the World" in _Endangered Species_. I
>don't think the stories are linked in any direct way, but they both share
>have a story within a story and ii is very hard to be sure what is going on
>in either the inner or the outer story.

I accidentally sent out this message before I was quite done. That last
sentence should be replaced by the following:

I don't think the stories are linked in any direct way, but they both are
science fiction stories that seem to involve a supernatural event which
results in the death of a woman. They both contain a story within a story
and it is very hard to be sure what is going on in either the inner
(supernatural) or the outer (science fiction) story, at least in part
because of a lack of information.

And I will add a final indication that Wolfe wasn't entirely serious in
writing this story. On page 43 of _Strange Travelers_, there is the
following passage:

---------------------
... her bot said it was for calling people who weren't there, and was well
known to science and all that. So we asked what the buttons were for and
the bot said they were to say who you wanted.
     "That's crazy," Jo An said, "why not just say who you want, like we do=
?"
     And the bot said that back then people mostly thought they were too
good to talk to machines unless to call them names, so they did this.
---------------------

Now, I don't find this a convincing explanation, personally. Someone is
having some fun here. It could be Jak or the bot, but my money is on Wolfe.

William Ansley

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

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