(urth) Looking for an Interview ...
James Wynn
crushtv at gmail.com
Wed Aug 3 08:33:57 PDT 2011
Nothing so emphatic. I think you are conflating two interviews:
http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/nonfiction/intgw.htm
James Jordan: I might as well at least /ask/ one of the $64,000
questions, so I'll just go for broke. (Hmm. I've gotta be very
precise here. Okay, here goes:) Which of the following, if any, are
physically (not in some merely literary or symbolic sense) the same
planets as Blue and Green, in the same order?:
Ushas and Lune
Urth and Lune
Lune and Ushas
Lune and Urth
Two Urths
Two Ushases
Two Lunes
Wolfe: None.
And this:
http://www.sfsite.com/03b/gw124.htm
Nick Gevers: When I began reading */Short Sun/*, I, like many
others, was struck by the new work's resonance of location with
earlier novels [*The Fifth Head of Cerberus*; */New Sun/*]. Twin
worlds, with respective blue and green associations: St Croix/St
Anne; Urth/Lune; Blue/Green. Not that these are literally the same
planets; but why this repeated pattern? (I should add that Joan
Gordon, and I myself, have speculated on an allusion in */Short
Sun/* to Kim Stanley Robinson's colour-sequenced */Mars/* novels...)
Wolfe: At the time I first brought in Blue and Green, I didn't know
about Stan's books. Nothing of that kind was intended.
Gevers: [Trying again:] Can your readers usefully view *The Fifth
Head of Cerberus* as being set in the same science-fictional
universe as */New Sun/*, */Long Sun/*, and */Short Sun/*? Why does
Fifth Head's pattern of blue/green sister worlds recur so
tantalizingly in Urth/Lune, Blue/Green?
Wolfe: I don't know.
When Wolfe says he "doesn't know", he is surely answering the first of
Gever's two shot : "Can readers *usefully* view tFHoC as set in the same
universe as Severian and Silk."
I simply refuse to believe that Wolfe doesn't know why the Blue/Green
pattern recurs. And following this line leads to the conclusion that
Wolfe is deliberately dodging the question. Two conclusions open to us are:
1) Blue is St. Croix thousands of years later. Problem: No Neighbors as
such nor Mother make obvious appearances in tFHoC.
2) Wolfe has other reasons favoring the Blue/Green pair (it's not just
planets), and explaining them, he thinks, would reveal too much of his
"secret sauce".
J Wynn
On 8/3/2011 8:15 AM, Antonin Scriabin wrote:
> Hello! I just finished /The Fifth Head of Cerberus/, and loved it.
> It is one of the best science fiction stories I have read ... it isn't
> very often I feel completely immersed in a world, but reading this
> book really made me feel like I was wandering through some eerie,
> mysterious realm where nothing was as it seemed. Absolutely fantastic.
>
> Anyways, I remember reading in an interview with Wolfe in which he
> said that Saint Croix and Saint Anne were /not/ the Green and Blue
> planets in the /Short Sun/ books. Does anyone have any idea where I
> can find that interview? Thanks!
>
> -K
>
>
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