(urth) fifth head owlet- wolf

Marc Aramini marcaramini at yahoo.com
Wed Apr 10 08:32:25 PDT 2013


Oh Gerry - because he is cryptic by nature.  Notice that no mention is made of that second space faring race using their hands at all.  
 
Gene is an engineer who loves mysteries, science fiction, and symbols that stand for "something other" than what they are.  He is also a dualist.
 
He is smart enough to know that God is absent from our every day experience but still believe in a structure or pattern of creation that points to an objective solution.  
 
If you don't think all the consistent imagery points to anything deeper, that's fine, but you have to ignore a whole lot of literal statements that are all consistent to avoid that elided bit of what symbolism is - something that stands for something else, sometimes figuratively, sometimes literally.  Believe it or not occasionally authors have hinted at something that is not overtly stated.
 
Whether I am always right is another matter, but to deny that Wolfe can write about one thing, drop allusions, and imply something else is a bit intentionally ignoring his ambiguity.  Wolfe's interview said Marsch was a shadow child.  Marsch is bitten by the cat.  How else does he become a shadow child if not through that infection?  


--- On Wed, 4/10/13, Gerry Quinn <gerry at bindweed.com> wrote:


From: Gerry Quinn <gerry at bindweed.com>
Subject: Re: (urth) fifth head owlet- wolf
To: "The Urth Mailing List" <urth at lists.urth.net>
Date: Wednesday, April 10, 2013, 8:22 AM




From: Marc Aramini

> I agree, the name Many Pink Butterflies indicates there are a whole lot
> of pink "transformed" individual, and a street name like rue d'asticot
> (street of maggots/larva) would be consistent with that (no new houses
> have been built in Port Mimizon for 140 years, and their birth rate is down.
> Number 4 (or so I assume) has cloned over 50 failed versions of himself.

*Mary* Pink Butterflies.  All the female children of the Hillmen are named Mary, I would guess, as all the males are named John, although the name is commonly elided.  And her mother explains why she is called Pink Butterflies also; it is because of her little hands waving.

Can somebody explain why Wolfe would have written a story and embedded randomly within it a bunch of highly obscure cryptic clues about how a race of apparently humanoid aliens are somehow really trees, or maggots, or whatever?  Especially when he actually *tells* us the secret history of their origin as part of the storyline?

- Gerry Quinn

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