(urth) GUT's and so on

[David Stockhoff]

  Ahh, I wondered if there might be a way to get Texas on that list ...

On 9/6/2010 1:49 AM, Jeff Wilson wrote:
> 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.
>
>