(urth) Lives of the Great Beasts

[Jerry Friedman]

So is there a consensus on what the seventeen megatherians are?

1) What I thought when I first noticed that title was that they were big animals, possibly with "ther(e)" in their names: arsinoither, baluchither, megathere, etc.  The book would be their "life histories": how they are born, grow, eat at different stages, interact with each other and with other organisms, reproduce.  It's just a coincidence that their number is the same as the Group of Seventeen.

2) They're seventeen famous evil people from history.  Cf. Borges's /Universal History of Infamy/.  Again the repetition of seventeen is just a coincidence.

3) They're Erebus, Abaia, etc.  The name and the allusion to Revelation (and Aleister Crowley?) would be appropriate.  The matching with the Group of Seventeen would not be a coincidence--we could speculate that each one "operates" one of the Group, or some such.  (I think somebody said that in the past month or two, maybe Lee Berman?)  It's hard to imagine what a book about their lives would contain, though.

4) They're the original Group of Seventeen, who were probably revolutionaries and evil enough (at least in Commonwealth propaganda) to justify being called great beasts.

5) They're a particularly beastly Group of Seventeen from some point in history.

6) They're something else.

If anyone is thinking of consulting /Lexicon Urthus/, Michael Andre-Driussi is totall noncommittal on this one.

Jerry Friedman