Urth Net
living a score
↰ answers m.driussi
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From: m.driussi at genie.com
With that out of the way--Inire as regent: what a dumb idea! Poor little wry-neck Inire, ancient and twisted! They only live a score of years! (That's 20, for you ultramoderns--so Inire is what, 19 or 21 already?) Serving autarchs since Ymar, skipping through the corridors of time! All reinforcing the notion that the trip to Yesod was thought to take less than a year.
Surely not all Hierodules only live to be 20. I seem to recall we only hear that of Famulimus and Barbatus. What about the Cumaean?
BTW, on an unrelated point, do people assume that the advanced tech of the Extra Solaraians is of a sort that can essentially allow for a spaceship of any shape? If so, is the ship of the Hieros we see hovering over Baldanders' castle intended to look like a standard Flying Saucer (which is how it is described) so that it will influence the past's perceptions/expectations of how extraterrestrial crafts should look? Wolfe has admitted to having some fondness for UFO books (In the intro to STORYES). I've always been fascinated by the fact that image of a "saucer" apparently was apparently originally invoked by Kenneth Arnold to describe the motion of what he saw, not its shape. I believe that disc-shaped UFOs had been reported before, but I'm assuming that the modern conception of the "flying saucer" is a 1950's thing and this seems to be what Wolfe is tapping into, complete with bug-eyed monster crews, etc. Perhaps if he'd grown up in the post-Strieber age he'd be describing them differently.
D