(urth) Borrowed Man writeup

[Robert Pirkola]

This hot/cold thing is pretty interesting when you get into it.  I just noticed two things that I thought were worth reporting.
First, Arabella is described as "very, very hot" (pg. 265).  Then you have Summer and Spring Peters. Summer lives in Kokolik City (pg. 228).
Presumably this refers to futuristic city on the Kokolik River in Alaska.  It is about as far north as land goes on the globe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kokolik_River.  Spring lives "down" in "Nuevo Dinero" (pg. 228).  This sounds like Mexico at least but
might be anywhere in the Spanish speaking parts of North and South America.  It is south of New Delphi.  Clearly they are being separated
into hot and cold camps.  You say that in *Short Sun* Spring Wind is associated with Mars.  If so, then Spring here would put Mars in the "hot"
camp.  Summer would be in the "cold" camp.  (Of course, it occurs to me that if there is a thriving city up in the extreme north of Alaska, something drastic has changed with Earth's climate, so does this really put Summer in the "cold" camp?)  Marc asks this about Summer (a heart surgeon) in his write-up: "Would a heart surgeon be privy to undetectable drugs which might mimic cardiac arrest or be useful in obtaining them?"  If heat is associated with death, then Summer living in Kokolik City would seem to answer this question in the negative.  If cold is associated with death, then the opposite.  How do you see hot/cold?  Certaintly Ern associates heat with his ultimate demise, but at the same time heat is necessarily about change and life is nothing if not change.  I generally associate cold with lack of change/death.  This is odd for Ern because he associates heat with death but maybe it is a necessary heat and death is necessary for life.  Earth is blue/cold/death because humanity has retired.  Is this what you are going for Marc?  Marc's write-up says: "I think the burning man is a metaphor for humanity, complacent in its damnation, rather than a literal statement about Ern as an individual."  But if humanity is complacent and retired and cold and blue and dead isn't the burning man a metaphor for the irrational fear the dead have of life?  Ern isn't scared of being incinerated because he is scared of dying, it's because he's scared of living.
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/df/USA_Alaska_location_map.svg/1200px-USA_Alaska_location_map.svg.png]<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kokolik_River>

Kokolik River - Wikipedia<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kokolik_River>
The Kokolik River is a stream, 200 miles (320 km) long, in the western North Slope of the U.S. state of Alaska. It rises in the De Long Mountains of the western Brooks Range and flows generally north and northwest into the Kasegaluk Lagoon. The river mouth is 1 mile (1.6 km) east of Point Lay, on the Chukchi Sea of the Arctic Ocean.. Its Inuit name, Kokolik, refers to the alpine bistort, an ...
en.wikipedia.org


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