(urth) interview questions

[Lee Berman]

Gerry Quinn: Colourful?  You haven't seen colourful yet!
 
I fear what you mean by that.
 
>I remain comfortable with my conclusion regarding the nature and current status of the abos.

Yes. I hope it is understood that my responses to your posts are not really designed to dislodge
you from your comfort zone but just to present ideas to anyone who is not quite so comfortable.
 
>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.
 
Borksi concedes his theories are collapsed? LMAO. Sheesh, that's as believable as Gerry Quinn admitting
someone else had a better theory than he does. I'd have to see it to believe it. I think what Borski
does is suggest that Wolfe deliberately and repeatedly undercuts his own "correct" conclusions to set
traps for those who cannot penetrate the intuitive requirements for which is the correct one. "Correct".
Sheesh. I swear Gerry, you and Borski would make an argument for which is the correct favorite flavor
of ice cream to prefer.
 
>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.)
 
This doesn't make sense. The "Maitres" clone family are not approaching perfection. They are, as you say, 
in stasis. They wonder why they cannot achieve more power and higher status. The answer is that they are
surrounded by other beings who are not in stasis, who are in fact, evolving. (Evolving more rapidly than
we initially knew, given the Lamarckian nature of their changing).
 
Speaking of stasis, what direction are you hoping for this List? Have there been any good new ideas in the
last 5 years in here? In your opinion, I mean. ;- )
 
>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.
 
Why? I suspect part of the motivation for this statement is that it is just so darn fun to call other people's
ideas "silly". (How many P&G engineers did Wolfe encounter who told him belief in God was silly? Quite a few
I'll guess). But Gerry, you did promise more colourful language when it comes to derision....
 
 
>The readers of a book live on a higher plane than the characters within it; 
 
Not always. Especially with an unreliable narrator. I assure you that Tzadkiel, with her chess queen-like 
omniscience, understands the mysteries of the universes better than we pawns ever could. (seems to me that
another character has been compared to a chess queen...)

 
>Thus the observations and hypotheses of the readers regarding events with a book are of greater strength than the 
>hypotheses of the characters.
 
The arrogance is sometimes astounding. Please remember that the observations and hypotheses of characters come from
the mind of the author. Yours do not. It is the author who decides whether reader or character knows more, not you.
 
> I have presented a 'timeline' for my theory - what does the timeline of yours look like? 
 
Good work on the timeline Gerry! You deserve praise for it. Still I think it covers only the known colonization of
the planets. It misses something important.  As I've already suggested in another post, the text suggests that
there was a much earlier crash on Ste. Anne. perhaps with a single human survivor (or even corpse?). This happened,
as the McCaffrey-Wolfe quote suggests, in the distant past of the planet, not a couple hundred years previous to the 
Marsch events.