(urth) interview questions

[Gerry Quinn]

From: "Lee Berman" <severiansola at hotmail.com>

> The elephant in the room for me still remains: Veil's Hypothesis. Gerry 
> has
> used some rather colorful adjectives to describe his opinion of its 
> veracity and
> those who might consider its veracity. I'm wondering, Gerry, has the 
> ongoing discussion
> opened things up any for you?

Colourful?  You haven't seen colourful yet!

I remain comfortable with my conclusion regarding the nature and current 
status of the abos.


> Borski devoted a chapter of Long and Short of It to this issue, with the 
> premise that
> Veil's Hypothesis must be considered as a possible conclusion. Some of his 
> evidence
> involves the appearance of lingering shapeshifting in characters we would 
> expect to
> rule out from being abos. I haven't seen Borski state it explicitly but I 
> suspect he
> tends to agree with my assessment of anti-Occam as a guiding principle 
> when it comes to
> understanding Wolfe.

Amazon showed me that chapter of Borski's book.  Borski certainly has a 
talent for coming up with ingenious hypotheses; the fact is though that 
those he comes up with here ultimately collapse, as he himself concedes. 
Disgruntled, he tries to assert that there is no correct hypothesis, which 
has the convenient effect of boosting the relative value of incorrect ones. 
I can well believe he agrees with you.


> Somewhere in the text of 5HoC is the explication of a certain engineering 
> priniciple or process;
> something about finding the heat distribution in irregular objects by a 
> series of closer
> and closer approximations, iirc.

I take it as a metaphor for the stasis of Maitres clone family after 
multiple iterations.  (Other iterative processes that terminate in a fixed 
state would have worked too.)


> For me this is second only to Veil's Hypothesis as a key to explaining 
> what is really
> going on in these two planets. I think it is a mistake to get stuck on a 
> single example
> of replacement, green eyes, tool use issues etc. and assume that's all 
> there is.

I don't believe the 'relaxation' analogy has wider import than the clones. 
Veil's Hypothesis is, of course, central to all interpretations; the 
detective story, if you will, is finding out how and to what extent it is 
true.  As we are told almost from the start, of course, its complete truth 
would be silly.  But unless the shapeshifting abos are a complete mirage, 
there must be some element of truth in it...

The readers of a book live on a higher plane than the characters within it; 
thus the observations and hypotheses of the readers regarding events with a 
book are of greater strength than the hypotheses of the characters.


> Surely the human body, brain and psyche are irregular objects. I detect a 
> subtext which implies
> that the imitation process is not a single event, but ongoing, with 
> progressively closer
> approximations of perfect imitation. This subtext is subtle and vague.  By 
> contrast, Veil's
> Hypothesis is so jarring a hammerblow that it leaves us stunned and mostly 
> unable to detect the
> other fine-grained hints without multiple readings. (GRW you devious 
> bastard!)
>
> That is one of the purposes of "A Story". In Shadow Children we are shown 
> a very poor approximation
> of humanity. They can't be shown in the main text of the story because 
> they would ruin the earthian,
> frenchy-colonial ambience Wolfe has established for St. Croix. But we NEED 
> to see them to see the
> earlier stages of imitation/approximation which have been almost perfected 
> in the main text
> characters we see.

That is a perfectly plausible part of a theory of successive states of 
imitation.  But how well does this theory fit other 'fictive facts'?  I have 
presented a 'timeline' for my theory - what does the timeline of yours look 
like?  A valid conclusion should fit all the evidence with the minimum of 
stretching.

- Gerry Quinn