Homeric Astronauts, Not
Jeff Wilson · 02 Jul 2002, 00:25
· from urth-v0207.mbox · original
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From: Jeff Wilson <jwilson at io.com> Subject: (urth) Homeric Astronauts, Not Date: Mon, 01 Jul 2002 19:25:51 -0500 Message-ID: <urth-v0207-1290 at digest.urth.net> X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0207/1290.txt.shtml MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable I meant to present this during the most recent 5HC debate. I think that _The Odyssey's_ appearance in the first part is the key to unlocking not the entire book but at least the mystery of the abos' origins. The account in "'A Story'" is mythologized history and even historicalized mythology in the same way that the Greeks dramatized the Trojan War and the Romans presented some of the usual mythic war of the gods motifs as historical stuggles of the legendary founders of Rome. The diminutive Shadow Children and the full statured abos are two branches of descent from an original group that arrived at the twin planets. This group lost or cut contact with Earth, which proceeded to develop more distant colonies that were more reliable investments in that ships or at least information came back. The forgotten colonists largely descend into savagery while some imbibe the native vegetation and change themselves with it, like some kind of pseudo-evolutional catalyst, gaining small bodies that are easier to keep fed on the scarce game and forage, and possibly some kind of biofeedback control, that would account for the age-changing and shape-changing abilities. The telepathy might be a real ability granted by the plant, but might just as well be an artifact of the need to explain why the Frenchmen came when they did. =20 I'll try to post some textev in a day or few. --=20 Jeff Wilson How Am I Posting? 1-800-555-6789 "If your SecOp can see you, so can the enemy." -Cpt Law --=20
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