(urth) interview questions

[Gerry Quinn]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Tony Ellis" <tonyellis69 at btopenworld.com>
> Gerry Quinn wrote

> > 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.

I must disagree - he is expressing a somewhat self-serving philosophy, but 
it doesn't mean he doesn't know the difference between how they see 
themselves and how they actually are.

> 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?

He's rappin'.  But this happens when Sandwalker meets them, and it's shortly 
after that that the first passage above involving the OWO comes, explaining 
the discrepancy.

Also, if the Shadow Children really and truly believed they were physically 
giants, they wouldn't have been clambering on the shoulders of the Marshmen 
later, and trying to poke out their eyes.  When it comes to an actual fight, 
they have no intention of trying to crush people like Sandwalker with their 
little fingers.  They know the score even if they can't bring themselves to 
say it.

It's like Aunt Jeannine criticising her abo theory in the third person - we 
shouldn't assume she is out of her head or lying about everything; we should 
take into account her motivations and we will understand what she is saying 
and the truth of it.


> >> 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?

He is correcting the "we" of the Shadow Child, because it no longer applies 
to him, the OWO - so the "we" is false.  Of course "they" is imperfect 
also - but I wouldn't care to put too much import on it.  I think his words 
are understandable as simply disagreeing with the "we".  Why would the OWO 
suddenly reverse his story now anyway - even if you think this minor 
grammatical slip constitutes such a reversal?


> > 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.

I don't think it would be typical of Wolfe, and even if he did use it, would 
he really put it in without any clue?  It would be so easy to have some 
Earthly artefacts that nobody recognised as anything other than some sort of 
sacred tribal heirlooms, and Wolfe could easily show us the nature of those 
heirlooms at a time of his choosing.  But there's nothing of the kind as far 
as i can see.

Meanwhile there's another people who say they are from Earth - they don't 
have artefacts either, it must be admitted, but they say they threw them 
away, and they do at least have memories; they know where Earth is and where 
Earth people are, that space is a vacuum and that sound is air vibrations, 
etc.  If these are the aliens, this isn't imitation - it's a complete 
culture transplant!  All human culture has been wiped from the humans and 
deposited in the aliens.  Who then took to drugs and have nearly died out.


> > 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.

But it *hasn't* been thousands of years - there's excellent evidence that 
it's only about a hundred.  The trees in the Eye tell us that.  Also we know 
that the twin planets were discovered when planets more distant from Earth 
had been colonised for decades (not centuries, or millenia).  Furthermore, 
Wolfe may be over-egging the cake here, but the photograph of Number Five's 
great great grandmother appears to be in sepia!

Dollo's law cannot plausibly apply here.  Humans could not permanently lose 
the ability to use tools over such a short period.


> >Why have they got a strange eye color?
>
> I wish I knew. I have a feeling that we're all missing something here.

If they are the aliens, there's no mystery about it.


> > 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."

But all the evidence suggests that the Shadow Children - at least those of 
the second novella, I agree it's hard to understand that particukar 
comment - are out of the picture now, a century and a half after 
colonisation (I presume they died out).  And anyway, if the Annese enable 
the original human discoverers (now the abos) to change shape, how come this 
ability does not extend to the later colonising humans?


> 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.

I think that's actually a somewhat defensible theory, in that it is in many 
respects almost the same as the 'Shadow Children are the humans" theory, and 
thus very hard to disprove.  But it does indeed have considerable issues, 
and it seems far simpler to accept that the Shadow Children are the humans 
(as we are repeatedly told).

- Gerry Quinn