(urth) May 2014 Wolfe interview in _Technology Review_

[Gerry Quinn]

On 28/07/2014 21:54, Marc Aramini wrote:
> Doesn't have to be a lie if something else can explain it. "Nope, 
> whole scene is fabricated." Why two species of alien if both won't be 
> used? Wolfe likes very elaborate games or there would be only one 
> imitative species. There's a reason we can still argue about it after 
> 40 years though. The puzzles are sometimes over constructed and offer 
> a nice false conclusion as well.

When you kill someone (or he dies alone) and you steal his identity, you 
need to fabricate a story of your own death, and explain why the body 
can't be found.  There's a logical  reason for this lie.

There is only one imitative species.  "Once there was a people using 
their hands - when they had hands - only to take food" - that's the 
Sainte Anne aborigines before humans came.  "There came among them a 
people who crossed from star to star" - that's the original human 
discoverers, who were imitated by the aborigines, and who themselves 
(d)evolved into the Shadow Children.

That's the only time, I think, when the Old Wise One uses the third 
person, and the last sentence of the paragraph explains it: "Once I was 
sure I knew who the first were, and the second; now I am no longer 
sure."  The Shadow Children's numbers have been reduced to three, and 
the mind of the OWO is constructed increasingly from Sandwalker's.

- Gerry Quinn