Urth Net
Digest whorl.v011.n035
↰ answers Endymion9
· by quotation
4 quoted lines
Endymion9 wrote:
OBW p.126
"Would it be effective for us to dig up one of the recent inhumations and release him to warn the others? The thought recurs. If the inhumas' eggs hatched in our climate, would not our human kind become extinct? What tricks Nature plays! If they are natural creatures at all. But they surely are. Natural creatures native to Green. Why would the Neighbors create something so malign?"
Endymion9's quotation of this passage in support of the fact that the inhumi do not breed on Blue reminded me of a thought I had after reading this passage again the other night. I don't remember anyone on the list discussing this. Are the inhumi the Neighbors' creation? It's possible. They (the Neighbors and the inhumi) don't seem to have been living side by side for ages. Rather, it seems as if the Neighbors' thriving civilization was brought down by the inhumi. Where did they come from? Did they arrive from some other planet? Or are they the result of the experimentation of the Neighbors, a failed attempt at some sort of biological experiment? Are the inhumi the curse on the technilogical hubris of the Neighbors? Someone may shoot this down immediately, but I don't remember anything in OBW or IGJ that would rule it out. The fact that Horn brings it up and then rules it out simply on moral grounds seems to indicate that it is possible. The Neighbors may not have created the inhumi "so malign", but they may have
become so.
Patera Bunny
*This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun.