Twin planets

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes · 09 Apr 2001, 10:08 · 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'l Danehy-Oakes" <ddanehy at siebel.com>
Subject: RE: (whorl) Twin planets
Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2001 10:08:32
Message-ID: <whorl-v0012-0555 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/whorl/archives/v0012/0555.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

> Daniel,=20

Grumble: It's "Dan'l," with no "ie". Or "Blattid," or "Roach"
if y'all prefer.

> the Dante parallels could do with a lot of expansion (how
> about it?),=20

When I'm done reading Dante -- I only noticed because I happened
to decide to read the Commedia recently.

> and the intertextuality with Le Guin's THE DISPOSSESSED is compelling.
> A thought there: in a Le Guin/Wolfe mapping, Anarres (attempt at
> utopia)=3DBlue, and Urras (dystopia)=3Dboth Urth (old, over-exploited,
> hopeless) and Green (like capitalist A-Io in THE DISPOSSESSED, only a
> Darwinist Hell in place of a Social Darwinist one.)

H'mmm.  I think this underestimates the "ambiguous" of Le Guin's
subtitle: THE DISPOSSESSED is about two worlds each of which=20
_claims_ to be "utopian" vis-a-vis the other, but neither quite
manages to be a utopia. I think the key to understanding THE=20
DISPOSSESSED is an idea expressed (of all places) in THE BOOK OF=20
THE NEW SUN v.1 -- the passage of the lake of the dead in Hildegrin's
boat, where Dorcas delivers herself of a little speech on how the
good and the evil in the world remain in a kind of balance between
internal and external.=20

Of course, Le Guin isn't a Catholic, but move the idea in to her
belief-system and you have the key to THE DISPOSSESSED: each world=20
_ought_ to be a Utopia, Urras because it has the resources, Anarres=20
because it has the anarcho-Taoist philosophy: but neither quite makes=20
it because it lacks what the other possesses. Each is dispossessed,=20
each incomplete without the other.=20

Of course, any simple mapping to THE DISPOSSESSED is going to be=20
radically flawed because SHORT SUN contrasts four worlds, not two,
and (counting roughly off the top of my head) at least ten systems=20
of governance -- Viron's, New Viron's, Gaon's, Soldo's, Blanko's,=20
the village on Green, the inhumi city, Dorp, uh, the place at the
end of the Whorl where Pig gets his eye, and the Commonwealth: all=20
their governances are shown at least in miniature; all are offered
to us in contrast with the others.

H'mmm.

Does someone have handy their copy of SHADOW? It would be=20
interesting to look at SHORT SUN in comparison with the short=20
treatise on governance Severian recites to the Malrubius-
aquastor.

--Dan'l

*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