(urth) Gideon

[Craig Brewer]

Paul Harvey is strangely apropos for a Gene Wolfe list. For those who don't know, he told little-known stories and anecdotes about famous people, or sometimes told common stories about them in ways that made them sound unfamiliar. Then, in the last "reveal," you'd find out who the person was, and the whole thing would fall into place, seeming a bit like a completely different story on reflection. Remove the easy "reveal," and you have a very Wolfean type of storytelling.



----- Original Message ----
From: Roy C. Lackey <rclackey at stic.net>
To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
Sent: Thursday, January 15, 2009 11:34:24 PM
Subject: Re: (urth) Gideon

Dave Tallman wrote:
> There's one more scene that takes on new meaning. On the hopper flight
> with Gib, Margaret pretends she has never hopped before and fakes a
> great fear of flying (pp. 154-156). It's an excuse to keep her eyes
> closed for the whole trip. She doesn't want Gib to see in her eyes how
> much she hates him, and to see the triumph in his look back at her.

Gil Corby was in the cargo space behind the seats, so I don't think there
was any danger of making eye contact. And I don't know that he knew then (or
any time before she went to Woldercan) that Margaret was Cassie. I assume
that any hop had the potential to warp time, and Margaret was afraid of what
might happen when the craft warped.

> With this reading, many of the objections to the book fall apart. Is it
> disjointed, with no connection from the madcap beginning to the dark
> horror ending? No, it's all horror, tied together by Cassie and
> Margaret. Does it end abruptly, giving no idea what will happen to
> Cassie? No, as Paul Harvey says: "Now we know... the rest of the story."

Sad, ain't it? But that's the way life really is--we don't get to do it
over.

(I wonder how few Listers ever heard of Paul Harvey.)

-Roy

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