Urth Net
Lovely Green Ste. Anne
↰ answers Tony Ellis
· by quotation
Tony, I find this eerie. When I skimmed your post in the digest I did not notice your subject line. I thought you were proposing 5HC as a prototype of the Short Sun situation, and I was all prepared to come back at you with an argument involving how certain patterns and subjects almost always stay on a writer's mind and constantly show up in the work without there necessarily being a connection (there are exceptions, but not so many). But you weren't. And now I have to do that switchover debate thing and make the point myself! And I don't even get to refute it. Oy!
-alga
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From: "Tony Ellis" <tony.ellis at futurenet.co.uk>
Subject: 5HC: a timeline with no dates
Every time I re-read ‘A story’ in 5HC, I find myself piecing things together again from scratch and from the few notes I’ve pencilled in the margin of my worn paperback. I made this little timeline to give myself a solid base to work from, and I thought I might as well inflict it on the rest of you, too. It has no dates, but lots of quotes to show that I’m not just making all this stuff up.
1. “`We were mostly long, and lived in holes between the roots of trees.’” Millions of years ago, a native species existed on St. Anne.
It
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was telepathic, but by our standards mindless. It may have had the power to change its shape: “’When we came some of you looked like every kind of beast…’”
2. A human spacecraft from a prehistoric civilisation on Earth splashes down on St. Anne: “’It is possible that our home was named Atlantis, or Mu…’”
3. “’The first heard the songs of the second and sent them out again – greater, greater, greater than before.’” The native species telepathically receives and amplifies the thoughts of the newcomers. This has two effects: a) the humans feel something they have never known before, perhaps the aboriginal ‘dreaming’ Sandwalker and his people share, and are seduced by it: “’We had no songs when we came here – that was one of the reasons we stayed…’” b) awakening to sentience, the native species is enthralled by the newcomers: “’We [the humans] so impressed your kind that you became like us…’” If they are shape changers, they begin to actually look like men.
4. Over time, the human arrivals lose all trace of civilisation, all memory of earth. The ability to use tools atrophies. They become the Hill People, and the Marsh Men.
5. The native species becomes the Shadow Children: "mock men". Stoned out of their tiny telepathic minds on a narcotic plant that makes them feel like God, they see themselves as the mighty star-crossing humans, and Sandwalker’s people as the “native animals”. Their communal telepathy makes this self-perpetuating.
6. On earth, the 20th century comes and goes.
7. The Shadow Children project a telepathic shield, hiding St. Anne and its sister world from detection by passing spacecraft.
8. Sandwalker’s story takes place. The Shadow Children remove their shield.
9. A human spacecraft from a future civilisation on Earth splashes down on St. Anne.