Amazing Wolfe Revelations

David Langford · 12 Jul 1997, 10:08 · from whorl-v0007.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: ansible at cix.compulink.co.uk (David Langford)
Subject: (whorl) Amazing Wolfe Revelations
Date: Sat, 12 Jul 97 10:08 BST-1
Message-ID: <whorl-v0007-0515 at digest.urth.net>
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[Posted from WHORL, the mailing list for Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun]

In-Reply-To: <199707120102.SAA20769 at lists1.best.com>

Mantis: many thanks for posting Our Gene's responses.

> 24.  "Why does the monitor . . . overrule their . . . choice of
> Green?"  Because the choice had been Quetzal's and the monitor,
> seeing his body, realized that he had not been a human being.  (You
> already knew the answer, and gave it yourself.  Why ask me?)

I too was puzzled by various people's past confusion about this one (in=20
the archive). Wolfe/Horn went out of his way to insert what would=20
otherwise be a nonfunctional sentence: "As it chanced, there was a glass=20
in this sickbay ..." So -- after initially accepting Quetzal's choice --=20
the monitor has access to the same visual information which causes the=20
women laying out the body to scream. And changes its mind.

> 25.  "Does Green/Blue have anything to do with THE FIFTH HEAD OF
> CERBERUS?"  No.

Told you so!

> 27.  "Is Pike's ghost really Quetzal?"  No.

[FX: sound of gnashing teeth]

Dave

David Langford
ansible at cix.co.uk * http://www.ansible.demon.co.uk/

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