Castaway

mournings glory · 21 Feb 2003, 23:46 · from urth-v0302.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: "mournings glory" <mourningsglory at hotmail.com>
Subject: (urth) Castaway
Date: Fri, 21 Feb 2003 23:46:36 +0000
Message-ID: <urth-v0302-2980 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0302/2980.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Hello all.

Delurking just long enough to post my own deranged thoughts about Wolfe's=20
"Castaway."

Is it just me or was anyone else bothered that the only named characters in=20
the story have decidedly non-futuristic names? There are Yarmouths and=20
Oberts in my local phone directory (well, actually Oberst, but close=20
enough), and yet we're meant to believe that the story takes place in the=20
far future, when the sun is dying. Surely, Wolfe, whose naming conventions=20
are usually brilliant, could have come up with less modern-sounding names.

Atrothers, on the other hand, seems pure Wolfean. I'm speculating that it=20
derives from the Latin "atrox" (horrible, abominable, fierce, savage,=20
unrelenting; "atrox" also being closely related etymologically to "ater,"=20
dead black, malevolent). "Others," of course, means, well, others,=20
presumably here aliens or non-natives; but notice how Wolfe uses the word=20
the lone time it's mentioned: "We got hit by the Atrothers." For some=20
reason, when I first read this, my mind flashed back to the anthrax attacks=20
that took place shortly after 9/11--probably because "horrible black=20
creatures" connotes for me the anthrax bacillus, and the similarities of=20
atrox/anthrax. And then I began to wonder: could "Castaway" actually be Gen=
e=20
Wolfe's fictionalizied account of an immune system response to=20
viral/bacterial/"alien" invasion? Sort of the sfnal version of "Osmosis=20
Jones'?

Consider the following bits of evidence:

"The sun was red and real close, but there didn't seem to be a lot if heat=20
in it" This could be the heart, either no longer beating or severely=20
compromised because of toxins in the bloodstream. Blood also orbits the=20
heart.

The years-being-shorter-now may refer to cells that are still attempting to=20
thrive in an essentially dying or dead body. (I assume that bone marrow=20
produces blood cells for at least some while after death--probably until th=
e=20
temperature cools or circulatory stagnation. And "years" of course is a=20
relative term--the life/reproductive cycle of a cell, therefore allowing th=
e=20
woman to be "millions and millions of years old".)

Given Wolfe's religious views, the "woman" discussed by the castaway (who's=20
also very definitely "sick") may well represent the soul, who is able to=20
communicate with her would-be rescuer various, if obviously more corporal,=20
joys: the descant of birds, autumn's foliage, etc., etc.

Everything in the ship is white, signifying the leucocytes of the immune=20
response, which seem "to just suck the color out of everything *except*=20
blood." The castaway, since he retains color, may be a red blood cell or=20
something equivalent to a platelet, or enzymatic thrombin.

And lastly, the "things inside her, eating the corpse" are lysosomes--which=20
eventually digest all dead cells.

All right, it's a goofy idea, but I thought I'd toss it out anyway.

(My vironese nickname and its abbreviation may well make me both fem and=20
chem. Daresay, I've been called worse.<gr>)

msg

_________________________________________________________________
Tired of spam? Get advanced junk mail protection with MSN 8.=20
http://join.msn.com/?page=3Dfeatures/junkmail

--=20

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