(urth) vanished people=Hieros

Marc Aramini marcaramini at yahoo.com
Thu Nov 10 08:32:41 PST 2011



--- On Thu, 11/10/11, James Wynn <crushtv at gmail.com> wrote:

>> Question: Wouldn't the Green Urth theory be easier if Green
> were in Urth's very distant past? That would argue that the
> Dionysus references are a clue to how the myth got there in
> the first place?*~  I understand that you want the City
> of the Inhumi to be Nessus but the clues are not
> overwhelming. Perhaps the Rajan's seeming parallel
> description of the city and Nessus was only an implied
> connection because they are both cities on the same planet
> or coincidentally at the same place.
> 
> *~ A Greek mythographer (I don't remember which one)
> attested that although Dionysus as the "newest" of the
> Olympians, he was actually much older...maybe the oldest of
> the gods.
> 
> J.

My only concern here is: why the past?  How did they get there if they left at Typhon's time?  Obviously with time travel there could be past or present, but why would the past be any easier than the future?  The whole point of the hybridization is instant one-generation speciation.  If there is NO hybridization then really nothing can account for the changes in species in even 100,000 years.  Why would he go forward in time when he's thinking about Green before the evil of the inhumi and winds up on Urth?  It makes no more sense at best and still has all the same problems as the Green is future urth, in my opinion.

There are quotes like "there must be a name for recognizing something you have called by a previous name" and "paradoxes explain everything, that's why they can't be explained" from krait over the pit. (direct quote after work, the first is when Horn's son is narrating and see's Oreb as scylla on urth at the very end of RTTW) that I feel are just explicitly meta-textual to what Gene is doing.  Statements like "how green it is after the rains" and "the city looks to the sky for a sign but no sign shall they get but the one from the fishes belly" (those are all paraphrases at this time) seem to me those places where it is Gene speaking to the reader rather than the narrator's voice.

The man in the colorless cloak with a stiff birdlike gait sure seems like a familiar figure, doesn't he?  Then again, the blue glow and the spider like fellow on Blue seemed familiar too, but in the interview Wolfe said that it was not urth/ushas, 2 urths, or 2 ushas so I don't know what to say.



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