War With The Ascians as a Proxy War?

Andrew Reeves · 11 Jun 2002, 12:23 · from urth-v0206.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: Andrew Reeves <ABReeves at mail.utexas.edu>
Subject: Re: (urth) War With The Ascians as a Proxy War?
Date: Tue, 11 Jun 2002 07:23:12 -0500
Message-ID: <urth-v0206-1195 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0206/1195.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:

> > That brings up another thought.  The Ascians are definitely baddies.
> > But if Erebus is, say Kim Il Song,
>
> Okay, whoa, hee-haw, stop right there. The analogy I was drawing
> there almost certainly does _not_ apply at the level of equating
> fictional character X to historical character X'. I was suggesting
> rather that Mr Wolfe's actual experience in such a proxy-war might
> make him more likely to portray such a war in his fiction, and
> pointing out some specific features that make me think that the
> war between the Commonwealth and Ascia is such a portrayal, and is
> colored by Mr Wolfe's experiences. But to try to draw character-level
> allegorical correspondences seems to me on about the level that tries
> to draw such correspondences from _The Lord of the Rings_ to World
> War II.
>

Yeah, it would be goofy to try to draw a 1:1 correspondence between the
imagery of BOTNS and anything happening here in the present.  Nonetheless=
=3D
,
if you've ever listened to Radio Pyongyang on short-wave (no, I don't
remember the frequency), it sounds creepily close to Loyal to the Group o=
=3D
f
Seven.  It seems that almost every other phrase is "Kim Jong Il wee dae
han soo ryong nim" (=3D3Dthe Great Leader Kim Jong Il) and a series of othe=
=3D
r
horrid totalitarian clich=3DE9s.

But no, there's no one to one correspondence, I was just sort of writing
down my ramblings.

Andrew

>
> --Blattid
>
> --

--=20

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