(urth) interview questions

[Jerry Friedman]

I'm interested to see people taking "'A Story', by John V. Marsch" as a source 
of factual-in-the-fiction information.  I took the title to be a strong 
indication that it's maximally unreliable and that to the extent we get 
information from it, it's information about what Marsch believes or wants to 
believe or especially wants his fictitious readers (who are they?) to believe.  
Or just what he thinks would be cool.


Of course, this led me to the wrong conclusion (that there were never any abos 
or Shadow Children), and when I learned I was wrong, it led me to think puzzling 
over "'A Story'" would be too hard, so maybe that's why people aren't doing it.

Jerry Friedman



________________________________
From: Tony Ellis <tonyellis69 at btopenworld.com>
To: urth at lists.urth.net
Sent: Wed, January 5, 2011 10:22:32 AM
Subject: Re: (urth) interview questions

> Gerry Quinn wrote [of Sandwaler]:
> Maybe the Shadow Children make him telepathic.  But you haven't
> really eradicated the notion of telepathic humans, even if you have lessened
> their power.

I think you're right, the Shadow Children enable the aboriginal
'dreaming' of this world. The native telepathic race are described as
receiving the thought of another and sending it out again 'greater,
greater, greater' than before. But that doesn't require any innate
telepathic ability on the part of those humans whose thoughts are
amplified.


> A few days ago I had to point out to James that Sandwalker's 'tree' was not
> an actual tree.  Cannot it be accepted that characters in Wolfe can use
> metaphor?

I feel your pain, believe me :-) But even if the Old Wise One was
speaking metaphorically, I don't see how it helps you. The Shadow
Children aren't tall and strong metaphorically any more than they are
physically. "We do no conceive of ourselves as you describe us, and so
we are not actually so" are not the words of someone with a reliable
grip on reality.

And they *are* crackheads. We get a long lecture about the herb they
eat, and how it makes them feel like God. Here's what one of them says
to Sandwalker when he's chewing the leaf:

"With my smallest finger, little native animal, I will break your
bones until the ends burst through your skin."

Sound familiar?


>> Shadow Child: "Since first we came here-"
>> "Since first *they* came here," the Old Wise One corrected him gently.
>> "Now I am half a man, and know that we were always here listening to
>> thought that did not come; listening without thought of our own to be
>> men."
>
> He can be refering to the half of himself that is Sandwalker.  This isn't
> too terribly odd a construction.

I find it an *excruciatingly* awkward construction. And why would he
need to 'correct' the Shadow Child at all, if the Shadow Children did
come here from somewhere else?


> Okay, you have a LOT of problems if Sandwalker and his people are human...
> First, how did they forget *everything* about their origin?  Earth,
> starcrossers, clothes... you name it, they forgot it.  How and why?

The same way they do in all those Star Trek episodes. It's a classic
SF plot device.

> Second, why can't they use tools?

Dollo's Law. They haven't used tools for thousands of years, so the
ability has atrophied. Remember, Dollo's Law is cited in terms of the
loss of a *previously existing* ability.

>Why have they got a strange eye color?

I wish I knew. I have a feeling that we're all missing something here.

> How did VRT replace Marsch?
By imitating his voice and looking older, according to VRT. He
specifically says that's all he did.
But if your question is really 'why do the abos have a minor ability
to alter their appearance?', I think this comes back to the idea of
the Shadow Children as telepathic enablers of the abos. There's an
intriguingly cryptic line in VRT where he says: "the question is not,
as I once thought, how much the thoughts of the Shadow Children
influence reality, but how much our own do."


> Third, why did the Shadow Children copy humans so badly?

Why does their ability have to be perfect?

Regardless of which, the Shadow Children are described as 'sickly' and
the leaf they are addicted to as 'poisonous', so I think maybe the one
has degenerated the other over the centuries.

It may be, of course, that the abos and the Shadow Children are
actually the same race, and that *all* their differences are down to
the leaf. I've often speculated in that direction. But that theory has
its own problems.
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