(urth) Short Story 30: The Blue Mouse

[Marc Aramini]

One more thing I wanted to mention but neglected to - in this story, the outcome of the main character jumping 2 marksmen with his friends is unclear, but there is at least a hint that they may have killed one of them when he says to his captain that a tech is perfectly capable of kicking a helpless man to death.
 
This kicking of a helpless person to death is actually repeated several times in Wolfe, and unlike executions or shootings, it is normally associated with a lot of introspection.  In "Home Fires", Skip thinks about a man kicking a child to death, a child that might or might not have been his.  In Short Sun, the emotional denoument is reached in part when Silk kicks Jahlee to death unexpectedly and brutally.
 
It seems that these fatal stompings usually have a lot of emotional/ conflicted depth in Wolfe, and I wonder if there is actually a real war experience or real life memory that informs that emotional impact (though I normally don't like assuming that fiction has a corrolary in real life, this one seems fraught with connotation).  These stompings are kind of a symbol of what an otherwise righteous person is capable of doing in extreme circumstances.

 
 
RESONANCE WITH OTHER WORKS: While individual conflict is unavoidable, I would say that organized battle scenes play a much smaller work in Wolfe than in other epic or military fantasies (Tolkien, Cook, Martin, and Erikson spring to mind). We do have pitched battles in Latro and in the Solar Cycle, in Home Fires and The Wizard Knight, but the actual military feel is present in only a small percentage of his short fiction. “The HORARS of War”, this story, the historical interests of “How I Lost the Second World War …” and “Donovan Sent Us”, along with “When I was Ming the Merciless”, “Hour of Trust”, and “Bloodsport” are probably the most overtly militaristic. A bleak socialist future is actually MORE prevalent than the depiction of conflict against it – and I think that this is fascinating. 
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