Liev's Postpostulate

adam louis stephanides02 Jun 1998, 17:25original as archived

↰ answers Tony Ellis · by quotation

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On Tue, 2 Jun 1998 Tony Ellis wrote: This explains why abos and humans, such as VRT's mother and RT, can interbreed. It also gives us Liev's Postpostulate: it's not that the Free People are colonists gone native, but that they interbred with (or possibly replaced) the original French settlers.

But this is a less extreme version of Veil's Hypothesis, not a reversal of it, which "Liev" implies. And it doesn't explain the bit about our thoughts influencing reality. --Adam

Tony Ellis03 Jun 1998, 11:05original as archived

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Adam Louis Stephanides wrote: This explains why abos and humans, such as VRT's mother and RT, can interbreed. It also gives us Liev's Postpostulate: it's not that the Free People are colonists gone native, but that they interbred with (or possibly replaced) the original French settlers.

But this is a less extreme version of Veil's Hypothesis, not a reversal of it, which "Liev" implies. And it doesn't explain the bit about our thoughts influencing reality.

Veil's Hypothesis is already a reversal - of the accepted view that the native Annese were wiped out during the first days of colonization. If Liev's Postpostulate was a simple reversal of Veil's Hypothesis we would be back where we started, with the all too mundane story of a native people destroyed by invading colonials, as in Tasmania and the Americas. Wolfe is very fond of ideas that reverse accepted ways of thinking ("we believe that we invent our symbols. The truth is that they invent us."), and I think for that reason too that Liev's Postpostulate would be a variance on Veil's, rather than gainsaying it. As for our thoughts influencing reality, surely what VRT is saying here is what Wolfe says again and again in his books, that we are the victims of our limited perceptions of the world. Mrs Blount and her fellow postwar colonists "think" the Annese are French war victims, so 80-odd years on that has become "reality". As Marsch says, there is a parallel with Earth's "Good People", or fairies: everybody "knows" that paleolithic man died out hundreds of thousands of years ago, and so that becomes "reality". The compelling evidence - lots of it - that they survived until very recently is reclassified as "folklore" so that no one has to worry about it anymore. If you've decided that the abos are all dead, you're never going to see any.