(urth) vanished people=Hieros

[Jeff Wilson]

On 11/5/2011 9:50 PM, larry miller wrote:
> First off I am not trying to prove anyone wrong or right.  I just
> wanted to say that I remember reading an interview with Wolfe where he
> is asked if the Neighbors are the Hierodules and he replies that they
> are not nor are they cooperating with them in any way to shape
> humanity.  Just wondering if any one can reconcile this with the Urth
> is Green theory being discussed.


If Green is Urth, and the vine-covered ruins are a long-abandoned 
Nessus, then the Neighbors are the remnants of the final, most ambitious 
uplift of the _actual_ human-cognate Hieros before their Ascension. Urth 
was an unfashionable backwater by then, inhabited chiefly by other 
experiements thus the four-armed gear and other nonhumanoid amenities. 
The flora-sprung ur-Neighbors eventually smothered the other underpeople 
races.

The continuity mis-matches between the series are explainable as the 
differences between manvantara-iterations. Just as the futuristic BotNS 
is actually in the deep deep past, the Short Sun books are in deep in 
that past's past.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at clueland.com
Computational Intelligence Laboratory - Texas A&M Texarkana
< http://www.tamut.edu/CIL >