The redhead

Michael Straight · 10 May 2001, 08:49 · from urth-v0030.mbox · original

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: Michael Straight <straight at email.unc.edu>
Subject: Re: (urth) The redhead
Date: Thu, 10 May 2001 08:49:43
Message-ID: <urth-v0030-0398 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0030/0398.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

On Thu, 10 May 2001, Roy C. Lackey wrote:

> However the theologians care to
> fit Lilith into the creation story, she, as you indicated, popularly is
> presented as Adam's first mate, necessarily before Eve, who herself
> antedates the Fall; therefore Lilith, too, existed before the Fall.=20
> [...]How Wolfe
> thought to work her into the Cain and Abel story, I don't know, but her
> complicity makes at least as much sense as the Genesis account, and, as he
> has done with other mythological material (e.g., the Sidhe story in PEACE=
),
> he doesn't let the "facts" get in his way when he wants to incorporate su=
ch
> material into his work.

Still, that's a big problem - Cain and Abel, and murder particularly, are
definitely post-Fall, so it's hard to see how Adam (and Eden) could still
be glorified and unfallen if Cain has already killed Abel.

I suspose it's possible that Lilith is referring to the Cain and Abel of
the new President's timeline/universe/dimension/whatever, and marvelling
over what it led to.  Or maybe the Adam that gets grabbed by the changer
(and the Eden the new Pres gets changed to) are from a third timeline,
before the Fall.  But neither of those explanations seem very elegant.

Btw, what do you see as the incongruity in the Sidhe story in PEACE? =20

-Rostrum

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

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