(urth) GUT's and so on

[Jeff Wilson]

On 9/5/2010 2:42 PM, Lee Berman wrote:
> The Old Wise One says:
>
>> "It is possible that our home was named Atlantis or Mu--or Gondwanaland, Africa,
>> Poictesme or the Country of Friends.
>
> Not sure about Country of Friends unless it refers to Quakers. But Atlantis is a legendary
> continent of the Atlantic Ocean. Mu the same for the Pacific. Gondwanaland is the name of
> a pre-cursor to Pangaea (existing long before humanity). Poictesme is a fictional province
> of France in the work of a somewhat obscure fantasy writer, James Branch Cabell.
>
> Africa is okay but the other possible homelands leave me very suspicious about the true
> Earthly origins of Shadow Children.

The "Country of Friends" is almost certainly a reference to Texas, named 
after the the indigenous word for "friends". Texas is quadruply 
appropriate as the boyhood home state of Gene Wolfe, as an assimilated 
colony, as the center of the American space program, and as part of the 
area where Coronado encountered similar deception and duplicity in his 
quest for El Dorado.

	It's also worth knowing that Coronado wrote that he considered the land 
to be useless, while standing amidst the undepleted buffalo herds, 
shortly to be "changed into" a new way of life for the plains indians 
and then into wealth for the colonizing Europeans.


-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
Computational Intelligence Laboratory - Texas A&M Texarkana
< http://www.tamut.edu/CIL >