Urth Net

← back to the conversation

About the secret of the inhumi, again (RTTW spoilers)

Kevin J. Maroney · 19 Apr 2001, 14:52 · 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: "Kevin J. Maroney" <kmaroney at ungames.com>
Subject: (whorl) About the secret of the inhumi, again (RTTW spoilers)
Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2001 14:52:57
Message-ID: <whorl-v0012-0654 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/whorl/archives/v0012/0654.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

In an earlier post, I pointed out this (in somewhat different words):=20

In _Return to the Whorl_, Jahlee tells Nettle a secret about the inhumi,
which, because of the structure of the story, we are led to believe is
*the* secret which has been sketched out in the first two volumes. The only
detail new to her revelation is that it is the children of the inhumi who
gain intelligence from the blood rather than the predators themselves.=20

A. Am I correct that this detail was not present in any of the earlier open
discussions of the secret?=20

B. If I am correct, it seems to me that this detail is supposed to be a
major revelation about the nature of the secret, and key to understanding
how the humans on Blue and Green could fight the inhumi. But I keep failing
to see how this detail transforms what we knew into "a weapon too big to
wield".=20

What am I missing?

Any responses welcome.=20
--=20
Wombat, a.k.a. Kevin Maroney kmaroney at ungames.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