(urth) The mystery of the image of an astronaut cleaned by Rudesind

James Wynn crushtv at gmail.com
Fri Jul 2 10:35:13 PDT 2010


On 7/2/2010 12:22 PM, Dave Lebling wrote:
> I'm really fairly amazed at the level of nit-pickery over this 
> question. Let us cast our minds back to the thrilling days of 
> yesteryear (the late 70s), when Wolfe wrote SotT. There was no 
> internet on which you could look up all the thousands of 
> then-unreleased Apollo program pictures, there were a few places you 
> could find pictures in hardcopy (Life -- already moribund, National 
> Geographic, a few coffee table books, etc.). As an SF fan, I'm sure he 
> had resources such as the F&SF cover -- or not, he may not be a pack rat.
>
> It seems quite obvious that the description he wrote is based on his 
> memories of various photos and paintings he had actually seen, but he 
> very likely wasn't staring at an actual photo when he wrote the words. 
> Even if he was, who's to say he might not have taken auctorial 
> liberties with what he saw?
>
> I know that after many re-readings of SotT, my minds-eye image of the 
> "canonical" Apollo photograph is now the (non-existent) one Wolfe 
> described.
>
> -- David Lebling, aka vizcacha

Yeah, but wonder, if he were asked, would Wolfe shed some light on that 
dancer with wings like leeches?

u+16b9



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