I realize this topic has been discussed (to death?) by the list before and also that Wolfe's own answers have tended to quash the idea of a "reality" behind the parallel, but the coincidences are interesting enough in their own right to be worth listing out anyhow.
Has Wolfe emphatically denied that Bleen is Number Five's
system? I do remember him responding to Gevers' question
as to whether it "would be useful" to view the systems as a
the same and Wolfe said, "I really couldn't say."
I posted a quite extensive list on this once upon a time
but I don't see it in the archives so maybe it was posted
in the lost year. Here is a partial list:
+ St. Anne is a green colored planet. Watery St Croix is blue. Incidently, "Pandora, by Holly Hollander" also employs the Green/Blue connection since the two protagonists' names are Holly (an evergreen) and Alladin Blue.
+ Mr. Million is a walking sacred window. Chems could be
thought of being the same.
+ Spiral staircase in the library and The Eye in which
Sandwalker is held are both whorls.
The following are (apparently) debatable, although I don't
seriously doubt them:
+ Number Five and V.R.T are somehow twins, since they
share each other's dreams. Horn meets his twin, another "Horn" among the Neighbors.
+ St. Anne has senient trees. In SS, the Neighbors are in
some ways trees, and if one doubts that, there is no doubting
that Krait spoke of them that way:
"The trees are bigger up the river. Bigger and older, and not
so sleepy." 306 OBW
+ The annese were originally "long" as the Shadow Child told
Sandwalker. So I'm guessing they were originally in the form
of the "huge worms, luminous but of the livid color of a dead
man's lips, writhe underfoot at night" found by Dr. Marsch.
Of course, the inhumi are also frequently compared to snakes.
- St. Anne abos...were said to be capable of
assuming forms far more varied than the inhumi.
I'm not convinced we know the extent of the forms
inhumi can take. We know they can assume human disguise
because humans are the subject of the story. But they must
have assumed other forms before humans came, and I
strongly suggest you pay close attention to those lianas (and
the Rajan's staff which was made from a liana).
- The 'neighbors' are said to have 4-legged / 4-armed bodies, obviously different from the shrunken humanoid bodies of the shadow children. They have mostly left Green/Blue where they were native, whereas the shadow children were said to be immigrants who came to St. Anne.
There is a great deal of doubt about what the Shadow Child tells Sandwalker as to their pasts. In fact, Wolfe has referred to Sandwalker as "the Shadow Child".
Oh yeah. And there's another similarity between Number Five' family and and Tussah's but for the life of me, I can't remember what it is. ;-)
J
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