Incus "elevated" to Prolocutor

Patri10629 · 25 Mar 1997, 09:41 · from whorl-v0004.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: Patri10629 at aol.com
Subject: Re: (whorl)Incus "elevated" to Prolocutor
Date: Tue, 25 Mar 1997 09:41:35
Message-ID: <whorl-v0004-0279 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/whorl/archives/v0004/0279.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

[Posted from Whorl, the mailing list for Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun]

Dear Mantis et all,

A Q & D plug for Mantis' "Quick & Dirty Guide to The Long Sun Whorl"...

What Fun! Thanks Michael.

I have one quibble of ambiguity--wow, in a Wolfe novel??--

On p. 19 of the Q & D under the Patera Incus list you write:

"--Scylla (riding Chenille) elevates Incus to Prolocutor, but later settles
for Remora's position."

The actual event (Hardcover Book III, p. 32) is a bit more ambiguous,
conditional (and humorous). Scylla actually appoints Auk Calde' (something
I've heard no mention of here or elsewhere) on the condition (as I read it)
that he fails to persuade Silk to obey her, and that he kills Silk. Then,
offhandedly, she says: "The idiot here (Incus) can be prolocutor under
similar circumstances, I suppose."

The humor (for me) is how quickly Incus seizes upon this insulting divine
promotion, enshrines it as an unconditional endorsement, and, judging by his
hostility toward him, how easily he forgets Auk might well soon be his boss!

And, speaking of ambiguity, what are those "similar circumstances" under
which Incus may become Prolocutor? Is this an invitation to assassinate
Remora?

Apparently the Outsider's in the details.

best

Patrick O'Leary

Questions or problems to whorl-owner 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