Urth Net
The Lupiverse(es)
↰ answers Craig Brewer
· by quotation
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Craig Brewer: I tend to agree with you. After all, an author can say what he attempted
to do. He can't always claim that he was successful or in as much control as he thought.
Heh, yep. Reminds me of David and my discussions on author as demiurge. You can create
everything in a world but you can't control the free will of the residents/audience.
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After all, Milton came up earlier: people love PL because they think it's a profoundly
Christian work AND because they think it's secretly subversive of that.
Hm, I think WOlfe's work resembles this. SF is a genre which has been a historic breeding ground for atheistic thought. Good portions of it have been devoted to explaining away religious beliefs and God's creation using science. Wolfe's work might be called profoundly SF (he has certain collected enough SF awards) but I think he uses his work to secretly subvert SF by explaining it away with religion.
That overstates it of course. Wolfe seems to want science and religion to coexist in some sort of simultaneous harmony. But in a literary world populated by Dr. Cranes, that could be seen as a form of subversion.
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If Wolfe said on his deathbed that it was all a clever front for a revival of Confucianism,
it would affect more than just my interpretation, but also how I chose, decoded, etc., what
actually happened in the story itself.
Thanks for this answer. It seems like a response which required some self-contemplation and
is a realistic (as opposed to idealistic) prediction of your reaction to my hypothetical
scenario.