Urth sacrifice

Dan Rabin · 12 Feb 2001, 21:23 · from whorl-v0012.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: Dan Rabin <wolfe-lists at danrabin.com>
Subject: (whorl) Urth sacrifice
Date: Mon, 12 Feb 2001 21:23:21
Message-ID: <whorl-v0012-0200 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/whorl/archives/v0012/0200.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Matt asks,

>(5) What does the following passage mean:
>"It was the magnetism that drew others to him that caused his embryo=20
>to be put aboard the lander. That was the work of Pas's scientists,=20
>as Pig's size and strength were. (Recalling the Red Sun Whorl that=20
>it became, I cannot but wonder whether it did not sacrifice too much=20
>for us.)" (RttW p. 96)
>
>The phrase in the parentheses really mystifies me. What does the=20
>first "it" refer to? What became the Red Sun Whorl? Is he merely=20
>talking about Urth itself? Is he talking about Silk's embryo? Is he=20
>talking about Pig's size and strength? Is he talking about the work=20
>of Pas's scientists? I just don't get it.
>
>And what is the second "it" referring to? What sacrificed too much=20
>for us? I assume he is referring to the first "it" as well, which=20
>means I still don't have a clue.

I take the parenthesis to mean that Urth looks very weak with its=20
dying sun, yet it is the original Short Sun Whorl from which the=20
_Whorl_ was sent out.  Urth can no longer accomplish such wonders as=20
building the _Whorl_, so the speaker is imagining that creating the=20
_Whorl_ sapped Urth of its vitality somehow.

Being exhausted by a magical creation is a common motif in the=20
fantasy tradition, I believe.

   -- Dan Rabin

*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