Theophanies, Silk's end

Alice Turner · 04 Nov 1998, 09:22 · from whorl-v0009.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: "Alice Turner" <al at interport.net>
Subject: (whorl) Theophanies, Silk's end
Date: Wed, 4 Nov 1998 09:22:49
Message-ID: <whorl-v0009-0043 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/whorl/archives/v0009/0043.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

>> Greg Neyman wrote:
>> > A New Question:  In Calde, Quetzal mentions that he's done his all he
could
>> > to ensure that theophanies stop occurring in Viron ... I never really
>> > understood why ... does it get explained elsewhere in an oblique manner
...
>> > or not at all?
>
>We do learn of one thing: Quetzal banned human sacrifice.

Greg, I don't think it's "explained," but does it need to be? Once you've
had a look at Echidna and Scylla in action, wouldn't you do your best to
keep them off-screen as well? Plus there is the destruction of the Pas
program, which may have loosed the others to do their worst. Quetzal,
despite his need for a meal beyond beef tea once is a while, generally seems
to be a benign figure.

=46rom Rostrum:

>I predict that if we see Silk at all in the Short Sun books, it will be as
>part of a Silk/Pas amalgram residing in Mainframe.

If you want to make a bet of it, I'll take it. I haven't got much of an
argument except that, speaking editorially, too much is unresolved at the
end of Exodus. There is the new murkiness in Silk's disposition and demeanor
that someone spoke of earlier. There is the question of Hy's allegiance.
There are the taluses under construction. It is true that we might not meet
Silk again directly (I will be sorry for that) but we will have to hear the
end of his tale. I reject the Silk/Pas amalgam because it's so baldly a
variant of the demonic offer of world control, and Silk really is a
"beautiful man."

-alga

*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