What does Horn look like?

James Wynn · 03 Oct 2004, 17:45 · from 2004-October.txt.gz

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From: thewynns at earthlink.net (James Wynn)
Date: Sun Oct  3 17:45:32 2004
Subject: (urth) What does Horn look like?
References: <000501c4a8e1$b8cb3690$6400a8c0@wynnhouse>
	<20041002.215853.74752432.christopher_culver at yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <000501c4a9ab$377b8480$6400a8c0@wynnhouse>

>Horn was only 35 years old or so at the beginning of OBW. While life
>was hard on the frontier planet of Blue, resulting in Horn having the
>tone of a crotchety old man, I don't think that by 35-40ish he could
>have had white hair. Instead, the picture of him as balding is more
>probable. Silk could have had white, long hair (in tBotLS we're told
>his hair is fairly long), but even he would have been pretty young, so
>life must have been really tough on the Whorl to make him look so
>ancient before the age of 50.

Well, life was no picnic on Blue, either. I remember reading "Angela's 
Ashes" as the author described his parents sitting by the fire clacking 
their false teeth, and I realized that at that point in the story they were 
in their late 20s or very early 30s. Yet I had already come to think of them 
well into middle age. They were worn out well before their time. So it is 
not inconceivable that Horn looked like a  middle-age man by his 
mid-thirties.  But the covers to IGJ and RttW describe very specific events 
in the story in which there is no real question whose body we are looking 
at. Yet it seems that one of them is a mistake. OTTH the character in the 
cover art is not the sort to make books fly off the shelves, so I'm thinking 
the design was not pure marketing trumping the author and story. Which makes 
me think Wolfe was involved.

I was hoping someone here would know definitively if the cover art were a 
mistake that was unapproved by Wolfe.  Or......do Horn and Silk look 
verrrrry similar? Either way, I have always considered it an important 
narrative point that Horn was balding so how he looked...whether it was he 
or Silk that was balding is kind of important (to me).

~ Crush

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