(urth) Typhon's nature

[Jeff Wilson]

On Tue, October 11, 2011 16:51, David Stockhoff wrote:
> On 10/11/2011 5:21 PM, Jeff Wilson wrote:
>> On Tue, October 11, 2011 14:22, David Stockhoff wrote:
>>> Larry was right to point out that Typhon probably senses the "powers"
>>> more than he "speaks" with them. But they are plainly Erebus and Abaia,
>>> or I have never read a word by Wolfe and live under the South Pole in a
>>> rusty tin can.
>> Typhon's ship commanders slipping away before he knows it argues against
>> his long-range ESP.
> Of course, it argues against good signal intelligence as well.

Skill at subterfuge and confounding men and machines is fairly common in
the books but there's no hint of a cloak against mind powers.


>> He mentions the Asciians in the same breath as the
>> beasts and knows they are beholden to them as the old autarch and
>> Vodalus
>> later confirm. This is entirely consistent with him retrieving Asciian
>> signal intelligence from automated listening posts; Vodalus confirms
>> they
>> use long-distance comms.
> This seems to assume Erebus and Abaia use ordinary radio. Right?

I don't know how ordinary it might be, but yes, it assumes that the
Ascians use radio along with robots and electric lights.


>> Typhon's sending of his thoughts into distant places remains a somewhat
>> curious idiom if it is not literal, but it is not entirely without
>> precedent in literature and bombast and other figurative expression.
> Its ambiguity-while-seeming-perfectly-clear would not be without
> precedent in Wolfe either.

"I've sent my Athenians into distant places."

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