(urth) interview questions

[Tony Ellis]

Gerry Quinn wrote:
> 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).

It's only about a hundred years since the French arrived. But their
arrival is the last event in 'VRT', when the starcrosser splashes
down, and Sandwalker and the Shadow Children are already there when it
happens. So clearly human beings - whoever you think they are - were
*already* on St Anne. How long have they been there?

"We came here either recently or long, long ago," the Old Wise One
says. But if it's recently there are all sorts of problems, not least
the fact that no one knew this star system existed until the French
'discovered' it. There's no helpful reference in VRT to an earlier
expedition, or a lost spaceship. In any case, later the OWO says that
his race have remained undisturbed here "for the longest time." And
even if the Shadow Children are human, they still need time to
degenerate into runty, round-eared pygmies.

Then there is Dollo's Law. VRT cites it as an explanation for why he
cannot hold a pen properly. But Dollo's Law requires an organ to
"degenerate through evolution" - not something that happens over
night. Whether you believe him or not, he is saying 'my ancestors
haven't used tools for millennia'.

There are other allusions to this. Marsch understands the Annese to be
a race so similar to mankind "that they might almost have been the
descendants of an earlier wave of colonisation," and goes on to muse
about the odd similarity of the flora and fauna to terrestrial types.

His speculation echoes precisely what Number 5 implausibly says in the
first novella, that "it is distinctly possible that the aborigines of
St Anne were descendants of some earlier wave of human expansion." A
million-to-one coincidence? I don't think so.

When I made this point on this list some years ago, some people
practically had kittens. I don't entirely blame them, but there it is:
Wolfe certainly seems to want us to think down these lines.


...As for the rest of your points, my rebuttals would mostly be
variations on what I've already said. The thing we can't seem to get
past is whether or not the Old Wise One is fantasising when he speaks
of being human. We read it differently and there I think the matter
has to rest. Lee asked my reasons for preferring one theory and I've
given them, probably in more detail than anybody wanted :-)

The next time I read 5HoC (overdue) I will make a sincere attempt to
see the Shadow Children as humans, and see if that solves any of the
other mysteries for me.