(urth) Crowley and mystery

David Stockhoff dstockhoff at verizon.net
Thu Dec 18 15:08:45 PST 2008


Yeah, other than what I quoted, it does sound fairly silly. I have a low tolerance for silly unless it's funny (see Snow Crash: very silly, not funny). Wolfe always disguises his silly.

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Message: 5
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2008 18:53:31 +0000
From: "Son of Witz" <sonofwitz at butcherbaker.org>
Subject: Re: (urth) Crowley and mystery
To: "The Urth Mailing List" <urth at lists.urth.net>
Message-ID: <W261571814178091229626411 at webmail45>
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Exactly what I was thinking.
the trappings are not at all similar, nor is the plot, but some of the meta concepts about time, recurrent anchors in history, fraud and veracity in religion are probably closer to BotNS than any other work I've read.
I'll have to read the first again, then the others.  Like I said, I had a strong "WTF did I just read?" reaction to the book, then it dawned on my, unbidden, months later in a real Aha moment.  There were several complaints I had about it, but once I began to understand it more, everything I thought was sort of stupid became symbolically perfect and apt.



> >-----Original Message-----
> >From: David Stockhoff [mailto:dstockhoff at verizon.net]
>   

>At a high level of abstraction, this sounds not very different from 
>TBotNS. Wolfe also forges an alternate history but on a vaster scale, a 
>history in which the miraculous truth and mundane deceit are conflated. 
>Note the line about Mary and Fatima and Ruth; after chiliads, the same 
>has occurred on Urth. And the last paragraph especially.



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