Urth Net

← back to the conversation

Digest whorl.v010.n070

Alex David Groce · 20 Jan 2000, 10:01 · from whorl-v0010.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: Alex David Groce <Alex_Groce at gs246.sp.cs.cmu.edu>
Subject: Re: (whorl) Re: Digest whorl.v010.n070
Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 10:01:16
Message-ID: <whorl-v0010-0226 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/whorl/archives/v0010/0226.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

alga said:

>Nicely reasoned, Wm. (and thanks for reprising the Lebling list), but I do=
n't bu
>y it for a moment. (And I don't think you do either.) Look, you guys, you'=
re all
> familiar with the author--what on earth makes you think that Wolfe is goi=
ng to=20
>give you the secret before Book III (if then)? Would that be in characacte=
r? Of=20
>course not! Not that it isn't fun to speculate in advance, but (IMO) the s=
pecula
>tions have been spectacularly un-Wolfean to date. Sweetness and Light is h=
ardly=20
>his game.

True.  I doubt we have enough to figure out the whole secret (or even the k=
ey).
However, Wolfe is also good for sticking clues to Big Secrets early in the =
text
and then making you slap yourself on second reading and say "Why didn't I r=
ealize
that?"  I think it's very likely that the whole "inhumi steal their nature =
from
us" idea is at the very least going to be an important element of the story=
 to
come (Krait!) and I suspect it has SOMETHING to do with Horn's Solution.  A=
nyway,
it is very Lupine to take Sweetness and Light as his starting point and pul=
l the
rug out from under it and us.


"And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." John 8:32
--
Alex David Groce (agroce+ at cs.cmu.edu)
Ph.D. Student, Carnegie Mellon University - Computer Science Department
8112 Wean Hall (412)-268-3066
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~agroce

*This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun.
*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.moonmilk.com/whorl/
*To leave the list, send "unsubscribe" to whorl-request at lists.best.com
*If it's Wolfe but not Long Sun, please use the URTH list: urth at lists.best.=
com




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