Palgrave History of Science Fiction

Marc Aramini · 06 Mar 2018, 23:41 · from 2018-March.txt.gz

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From: marcaramini at gmail.com (Marc Aramini)
Date: Tue, 06 Mar 2018 23:41:14 -0000
Subject: (urth) Palgrave History of Science Fiction
In-Reply-To: <9cec3317-ddf7-471f-3157-e17e77fdd8da at casema.nl>
References: <9cec3317-ddf7-471f-3157-e17e77fdd8da at casema.nl>
Message-ID: <CAF1072yUbVcdZz416ha3QMqQJ3+rYtwV5JhuUdkM=ApzBN1-HQ at mail.gmail.com>

I don't want to start a round of Short Sun stuff (please, please, please)
but here is my take on what he may or may not be talking about: some time
after Horn falls into the pit on Blue, a Vanished Person who also calls
himself Horn appears to speak to our narrator. That's the only new
speciation that might have anything to do with Horn - the rest Roberts
refers to are the false clues Wolfe is giving us that Silkhorn might be
inhumi: (light, doesn't have a good appetite - is he truly a normal man
with his ability to walk through the woods without being touched? (yes, he
has made a deal with the vanished gods, who are trees)

Having said that, Horn dies on Green, goes into Silk's body who has just
faced Hyacinth's death on the whorl and has either psychologically
retreated or mostly succeeded in killing himself, is a true amalgam of Horn
and Silk as he writes On Blue's Waters in as the Rajan of Gaon. When he
sits under the tree at the end of On Blue's Waters the majority of Horn's
spirit goes into Babbie and becomes the beast with three horns, then it is
Silk in denial for the rest of the book, Silk a man as he always was, until
finally he is faced with the truth with the passage invoking the death of
Hyacinth in the writings and has come home to a house that is not his.

But hey anyone can believe what they want - I have zero interest in arguing
this one at all. Just trying to address what he might be talking about.

On Tue, Mar 6, 2018 at 2:46 PM, Ab de Vos <foxyab at casema.nl> wrote:

> Adam Roberts is a literature professor as well as a science fiction writer.
>
> In his "The History of Science Fiction" he devotes a short chapter to
> Wolfe which he concludes by relating Wolfe to his (Roberts) main thesis
> throughout the book: "Wolfe not only revisits many of the conventions of
> 20th-century SF, he goes further back than that, tapping into the deep
> roots of the genre, interrogating the many ways in which notions of
> salvation are inflected by our much broader materialist understanding of
> the cosmos."(page 439)
>
> After treating preliminaries his history starts in chapter 4: "Seventeenth
> century SF". Central is the dialectic between matter, spirit and
> technology. Very interesting. His chapter on Wolfe contains, I believe,
> some errors. He says for instance:"Horn may or may not, mutate  into a new
> form of life across the course of the trilogy. "(page 438) Anybody ring a
> bell. I thought Silk was Horn but didn't want to give him up because then
> he Horn would be dead as they were sharing the same body.
>
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