(urth) interview question

[Gerry Quinn]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Lee Berman" <severiansola at hotmail.com>
>
>>Gerry Quinn: I think it is wrong to think of Aunt Jeannine as an 
>>unreliable narrator in
>>this instance.  "An unreliable narrator is a narrator, whether in 
>>literature, film, or theatre,
>>whose credibility has been seriously compromised."  Jeannine does not fit 
>>this definition.
>>Although she hides her identity, there is no credibility issue - in fact 
>>one
>>could say it makes her *more* credible as a judge of Veil's motivations
>
> Heh, that's pretty ironic. Aunt Jeannine misrepresents her name, gender 
> and identity to Number
> Five. She also asserts that there is no evidence that abos could change 
> shape and that they
> have died off long ago. Yet somehow she is a reliable narrator? About her 
> own motivations, perhaps
> but, as we later see, she is completely wrong about her own theory, which 
> is correct.

She is - as befits a careful and modest scientist - stating the case for the 
idea that abo shapechanging is a myth.  Just before that she carefully 
elaborates to the narrator on details of Veil's Hypothesis ("I feel sure Dr. 
Veil meant...").


>>Of course, Veil's Hypothesis is not wholly false; we do have one incident 
>>of
>>an abo replacing a human, after they had been travelling alone together 
>>for
>>a long period.  And clearly the shapechanging aboriginal Annese have 
>>entered
>>human society to some extent - but equally clearly they have not killed 
>>and
>>replaced the human colonists en masse. Indeed we may assume they are
>>outcasts for the most part.
>
>>There has been no wholesale replacement of humans by the native
>>Annese; this is plain from such diverse indications as eye colour, tool 
>>use,
>>and the stories of Marsch's interviewees.
>
> Sigh..this is so difficult.. Gerry I think you are continuing to treat a 
> fictional world as though it
> were the real world, where parsimony and Occam's Razor are valid 
> principles. In fiction they are not.
> You know, for years there were debates here over whether Dr. Marsch was 
> actually replaced. I introduced
> the Wolfe quote you cite in the middle of one argument and there hasn't 
> been a debate since. But it shows
> that some people are so intent on "weighing evidence" they forget the 
> purpose of writing a story.

I am not depending on parsimony and/or Occam's Razor.  I am pointing out 
something that is made plain as the nose on your face in countless places 
throughout all three novellas.  I am almost at a loss as to where to begin 
demonstrating it; it's hard for me to guess which arguments might best sway 
someone who can hold such a grotesque misreading of the work as you put 
forward!

Let's start with the simple and obvious facts of the case - two separate 
planets full of humans who act like humans and think they are humans and 
maintain a human, albeit in some parts vicious, culture, and welcome human 
visitors from Earth.  On Sainte Anne they remember details of their journey 
from Earth, and tell tales of the abos and of previous human colonists. 
There are many myths and stories aboout the abos.  There is *nothing* 
anywhere to suggest that they leaped on people, killed (or devoured) them 
and replaced them.  The only incident of replacement we know of involved a 
man who travelled alone with a highly motivated abo for a long period - and 
even then we do not know any details of the original Marsch's death, which 
may well have been from natural causes (an infected wound) or at least 
accidental.  If such replacement incidents had been commonplace, the 
colonists - who even you accept *think* they are human and live as the 
original humans would have - would have told tales about them and feared the 
abos, which patently they did not.  Did nobody notice even when a second 
*planet* had to be infiltrated?  Has Earth been taken over by the abos too?

There is simply no room for the scenario you propose.  The above is more 
than enough in itself to rule it out, but in any case Wolfe has left 
numerous specific clues as to the correct reading of 5HoC which also 
completely eliminate this idea.  I will come to them (or some of them) as I 
go on.


> Why would an author (who tends to horror) introduce Veil' Hyphothesis then 
> write this novel full of clues
> twists and turns to reveal... nothing.  Or one case of replacement. Or 
> maybe just some minority replacement
> of the population. Where is the horror in that?

Wolfe introduces many more myths and stories other than Veil's Hypothesis. 
Like Veil's Hypothesis (and Veil's Criticism of Veil's Hypothesis) they all 
have elements of truth, but it is always distorted.  5HoC is not a cheap 
horror TV special from the Fifties.  Wolfe utilises pulp elements, but he is 
not writing pulp.  The novel is not centred on some big reveal about the pod 
people of Sainte Anne.  If that is your criterion for a quality read, you 
might be better off with other authors.  If you want horror, consider the 
question - posed in effect by Aunt Jeannine - of whether it is more horrific 
that Sainte Croix is a planet inhabited by alien monsters, or a planet 
inhabited by humans.


> Aunt Jeannine and Dr. Aubrey Veil throw down the gauntlet early: either 
> Veil's Hypothesis is 100% false or
> 100% true. None of this namby-pamby partial stuff. I'm not sure how to 
> explain it other than to say that a
> weak realization of Veil's Hypothesis would violate a rule of 
> story-telling. If stories were as boringly
> ambiguous as the real world, with partial resolutions and half-baked 
> conclusions, we wouldn't write or
> listen to fiction stories. Cinderella doesn't do the magic pumpkin, ball 
> and slipper routine just to go on a
> few dates with Prince Charming then decide he isn't Mr. Right and go home 
> to live with her steps. That
> story would simply suck (except as parody). Or be "lame" as Gene Wolfe put 
> it.

Actually if it were 100% false or 100% true it would violate the rules of 
5HoC, in which just about *nothing* is completely false or completely true. 
Veil's Hypothesis (and its contradiction, also by Veil) fit perfectly into 
the pattern Wolfe is creating in 5HoC, which reflects something that has 
often occured in the real world.  A central theme - perhaps the central 
theme of the book as a whole, though not the title novella - of 5HoC, which 
seems to have passed you by, is colonisation and its consequences.  The 
unfortunate abos are doomed to ape the culture of their conquerors, and are 
despised as outcasts and vagabonds.


> I don't understand your evidence of "eye color". Could you explain?

How can anyone miss this clear signifier which tells us (better than tool 
use, although it seems the French did not know of it) who is an abo and who 
is not?  Abos have green eyes.  Humans rarely do, at least not in the same 
shade.  Here is (the superseded) Dr. Marsch, the only abo we meet outside 
the second novella, except perhaps the cat, whose eye colour may be 
inferred.  The narrator of the first novella says: "His eyes, I noticed, 
were a bright green, without the brown tones most green eyes have."  The 
original Marsch noted VRT's green eyes not once but twice; on the second 
occasion, he pronounced them "a startling green".  The Annese apparently do 
not or cannot change their eye colour a easily as they can adapt other 
aspects of their physiognomy.  Now you might think these green eyes are just 
an extra clue relating to the identity of Marsch, but there is more. 
Towards the end of the second novella, we read:

[Sandwalker asks Cedar Branches Waving] "Mother, what colour are my eyes 
now?"
"Green," Cedar Branches Waving answered.  "They look gray in this light, but 
they are green.  That is the colour of eyes."
[...] And Seven Girls Waiting added, "Pink Butterflies' eyes are green too."

Green is the colour of abo eyes.  Just like two is the number of Typhon's 
heads.

[Incidentally we aren't told what the colour of the Shadow Children's eyes 
are.  Perhaps Wolfe felt it was so obvious that they are human that he 
didn't need to rub it in.]


> We are told there is a planetary look on St. Croix. Number Five has it.

And Marsch (the abo) doesn't!  Nor, incidentally, do "the gypsies and the 
criminal tribes".  No doubt these groups of outcasts include many abos among 
their number.


>With regard to the tool use issue and Marsh's interviewees you are missing
> something important. We hear stories which purport that abos are just 
> animals- so bad with tools they can't use
> a shovel. But we have prima facie evidence they are capable of extremely 
> fine motor skills- Handwriting. It
> may be poor handwriting but it is legible. If you can write legible 
> sentences, you have become a rather skilled
> tool-user, by animal standards.

By animal standards, yes (although we have learned in recent decades that 
animals are cleverer in this regard than we used to think).  By human 
standards, their tool use is indeed rather poor, as we learn from several 
sources.  Perhaps the French had an exaggerated idea of the difference; 
after all, they apparently failed to catch all the abos, and they never 
noticed the eye colour clue.


> Still, some feel that the general disrepair of both St. Croix and Ste. 
> Anne is due to the serviceable but
> sub-standard tool use of the current inhabitants.

There are more than adequate rationales for any disrepair based on the human 
cultures and histories of the twin planets.  Besides, as someone already 
pointed out, we know that VRT's handwriting is exceptionally bad BY THE 
STANDARDS of these societies.

- Gerry Quinn