(urth) interview questions

[Tony Ellis]

Lee Berman wrote:
> Ah..MAYBE NOW I get what Tony is getting at. Maybe.  If there was a long ago crash of a human starship
> on Ste. Anne, those humans (or maybe single human?) were imitated by Shadows. After a long period
> with no further source material, those imitated humans degenerated into Shadow Children (shrinking
> and losing their thumbs, becoming more shadow-like again I guess). Then when new waves of humans arrived,
> that's why Dollo's Law gets invoked. They have to re-establish the lost digit and its neural connections.

Almost. :-)
I'm suggesting humans came to St Anne long ago, were imitated by the
indigenous shapechangers, and these imitations became Shadow
Children... but that the humans became the abos, gradually losing not
their thumbs but the brain/muscle functions of tool-users.


Jeff Wilson:
> What about the lack of artifacts of the stat-travelers, and the
> integration of primates into Earth's fossil record?

I think you answer your own question in your exchange with Lee. At the
time Wolfe was writing, there was all sorts of crackpot 'evidence'
that we had long-ago contact with the stars. A firm favourite was the
bas-relief supposedly showing a Mayan astronaut.

I have no idea how seriously Wolfe takes this nonsense, but I know he
loves it. In Castle of the Otter, he muses that the myth of the Talos
of Crete reads uncannily like an encounter with a security robot. In
The Lost Pilgrim, a time-traveller from a science-fiction future
discovers that the monsters of Greek myth were real.