IGJ, impressions, riddles, many spoilers! (of

Kevin J. Maroney · 30 Jul 2000, 14:05 · from whorl-v0011.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: "Kevin J. Maroney" <kmaroney at crossover.com>
Subject: Re: (whorl) IGJ, impressions, riddles, many spoilers! (of
Date: Sun, 30 Jul 2000 14:05:04
Message-ID: <whorl-v0011-0018 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/whorl/archives/v0011/0018.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

At 12:04 PM 7/29/00 -0400, vizcacha wrote:
>Second, and more importantly (and here we are getting close to the true
>secret), there are actually no inhumi.  There is only, poignantly, "a girl
>trapped in the body of a blood-drinking reptile."  The inhumi only have
>"spirits" because their victims have spirits, only have intelligence becau=
se
>their victims have intelligence, and so on.=20

I don't think this point has been made here: The inhumi seem specifically
to be telepathic reptiles tht developed their telepathy to enhance their
predation. It seems likely that the assumption of human characteristics is
a side-effect of this telepathic ability. I can't tell if they are capable
of true shape-shifting; their ability to pose as humans is certainly
enhanced by, and may be completely, telepathic projection. Note that this
does *not* seem to be part of what Krait told Horn on Green, since Horn
doesn't realize this until he sees the camouflaged hunters in Goan.=20

It seems that Incanto's travel between worlds is a combination of the
inhumi telepathic projection and the Vanished People's indeterminate realit=
y.=20

>Jahlee describes the
>pursuit of Horn at the end of OBW, and how the inhumi all felt they should
>kill him, but each hoped that another would do it first.  They feel this w=
ay
>out of gratitude and also, I think, because the people whose blood they ha=
ve
>absorbed would not be quick to kill either. Few are eager to cast the first
>stone, sinful or not.  Result, Horn escapes.

Well, also, the inhumi are strongly biologically conditioned not to kill
their prey. In "nature", they will feed on a victim repeatedly over the
course of years rather than kill. If the inhumi surrounding the Rajan at
the end of _Blue_ have not fed from killers, they will not have "learned"
how to kill, themselves.=20

>Perhaps the secret is that if the inhumi are treated justly, treated as we
>would like to treat other human beings, they will gradually become less of=
 a
>threat.  ... Horn sees that as a possible future for humanity as well, and
>on Green it is coming true; the villages capture other humans to sell to t=
he
>inhumi as slaves.

I'd go a step further: If all the inhumi are treated as human by all
humans, they will *become* human. But I think there's one more twist to the
secret coming, and I don't know what it is. So far, Wolfe has overdelivered
on every promise of the narrative; I'd like to think he's capable of
overdelivering on the promise of the secret of the inhumi as well.=20

(The telepathic predator reminds me of a minor humorous Larry Niven short
story, "The Nonesuch". Spoiler: The Nonesuch is so powerfully telepathic
that when its human prey sees it and thinks, "The Nonesuch isn't real! It's
a fairy-tale", the beast disappears.)

>Horn pushes all the clues out, and lets Hide [figure it out] himself.
>(There's a lot of this in the book.  It happens with Mora, too.  I wonder =
if
>Wolfe does this a lot in his real life?  Must have been very frustrating f=
or
>his children.)

I don't know Wolfe well enough in person to judge that at all, but note how
thoroughly he does it to his readers. :-)=20

--=20
Wombat, a.k.a. Kevin Maroney kmaroney at crossover.com
Kitchen Staff Supervisor, New York Review of Science Fiction
http://www.nyrsf.com

*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