(urth) Typhon's nature

Jeff Wilson jwilson at clueland.com
Tue Oct 11 19:13:30 PDT 2011


On 10/11/2011 5:55 PM, David Stockhoff wrote:
>
>
> On 10/11/2011 6:41 PM, Jeff Wilson wrote:
>> 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.
> Typhon is not a mind reader. No one suggested that he was.

>>>> 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."
> Meaning? BTW, he sent his thought into distant places. Not his thoughts.

I don't want to hog the whole gauntlet of quibbling challenges, I'll 
give the rest of the class a chance to answer some.


 >>>> 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.
 > So you mean that the Ascians have revealed their fealty to Abaia in
 > their radio communications. That makes sense.

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



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