(urth) the prime calcula/his citadel and oreb

[Marc Aramini]

--- On Sun, 1/16/11, Gerry Quinn <gerryq at indigo.ie> wrote:

> > I think the more obscure clues can often be pointers to the
> ideas Wolfe is getting at, but I also think that in his SF
> it's the concrete events and details - the stuff that
> actually happens - that holds the key to
> understanding.  It's not the Mystical Kabbalah - it's a
> science fiction story, guys!
> 


I think we have to agree to disagree about his style.  He elides habitually.  He just does it, he isn't a concrete straightforward writer and these cryptic little visions operate almost exactly like Kabbalah to some degree.  When you read Peace did you read it already hearing that the narrator was dead?  

I hope someday some merciful publisher decides to publish my stuff, because I love this cryptic repayment.  In one of my novels on the last page it seems to have a happy ending, but if you follow the trail of little narrative interruptions everybody is about to die most horrifically, people unknowingly married their half sisters, etc. Just a blatant rip off of what I see in Wolfe, really, minus the talent, probably.

Some people write that way, and Wolfe has proven to be one of those guys, or his narrative would not be so confusing.

I read Peace first without any kind of explanation, and just like Gaiman said the book completely transformed the second time through, where this sick realization kind of gets at you, then you research stuff, and its provable that he is dead, that people are disappearing, that colors are associated with names so that when a blue ribbon wraps a coffin like basket it says something about a character associated with Blue.  You know why it is accepted that Weer is dead, because those clues there are if anything MORE cryptic than the visions that are straightforward in Long Sun?  Because Wolfe said it in an interview.  I don't think anybody put it together.  I think Wolfe just came out with it and it became common knowledge.

He is a cryptic writer, and these gaps and mysteries (ie - saying Silk is a grown embryo, then showing us two sets of parents, then Silk saying "I found out something about how I came to be in the tunnels") - might mean that we CAN infer his parents - or there would not be these abominable hints, location stated and all. Why bother to show us two sets of parents if we couldn't at least propose plausible identities?  Just for the heck of it? Maybe sometimes he doesn't want them assembled, but other times he has a concrete solution in mind. He is a far more mystical writer than the usual Hard SF writer, and a far more interesting one.

But there IS a way to make the dream statements true, just as there is a way to make the "riding a beast with three horns" symbolically true, with a few associations and applications.  If they were random, we couldn't make them true so easily.  Jokes don't have extensive textual resonance, dream statements that are random don't corroborate other comparisons in the text