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<DIV style="font-color: black"><B>From:</B> <A title=dstockhoff@verizon.net
href="mailto:dstockhoff@verizon.net">David Stockhoff</A> </DIV></DIV></DIV>
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But here we have kindergarten mythology leaping out at us. Echidna is <BR>>
well know to be the mother of monsters. Typhon's and Echidna's family is
<BR>> a veritable pantheon of divine monsters. The onus is on you to deny a
<BR>> theory of how this situation came about and what it means in New Sun
and <BR>> Long Sun. You'll need to do more than sit back and yawn if you wish
your <BR>> denials to be taken seriously.</DIV></DIV>
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style="FONT-STYLE: normal; DISPLAY: inline; FONT-FAMILY: 'Calibri'; COLOR: #000000; FONT-SIZE: small; FONT-WEIGHT: normal; TEXT-DECORATION: none">Sure,
they are given the names of divine monsters, and that accords with their
behaviour, or at least the behaviour of some of them.</DIV></DIV>
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<DIV><BR>> Why should Wolfe care if he recasts a father as a son to create
this <BR>> debased and pagan Olympus? You say yourself that allusions don't
matter! <BR>> Wolfe is already necessarily picking and choosing among
disparate <BR>> mythologies. I see Milton's Satan in there plain as day,
because Satan <BR>> raped his daughter to produce all the sins of the world.
I could go on.<BR></DIV>
<DIV>I never heard that myth, and I also don’t know that Typhon raped
Cilinia. Maybe he did, but I don’t see it in the book, and Wolfe does not
write the sort of modern literature in which it is a truth universally
acknowledged that a single woman who is in the possession of a fucked up nature
must have been raped by her father. Also in Long Sun, as distinct from New
Sun, Typhon is a Demiurge perhaps, but he is not Satan.</DIV>
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<DIV><BR>> But incest couldn't possibly happen in New Sun! No, Wolfe would
avoid <BR>> this topic, the bread and butter of half the mythologies (and
ancient <BR>> dynasties) of the world, to avoid upsetting Gerry Quinn with
the <BR>> covertness of its secret histories.</DIV>
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<DIV>There IS incest in New Sun – at least two major instances - and we are told
about them in the story and in what characters say. Wolfe doesn’t hide
silly clues in peoples’ names by naming Agia and Agilus after Van and Ada,
say.</DIV>
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<DIV>Tell me where the story is advanced by Echidna being Typhon’s sister.
And tell me why nobody, even people who knew Typhon, remarks on it ever.
And tell me why, if Wolfe wants to indicate that Typhon’s family are going
through the motions of replicated characters in an ancient myth, or at least one
selected version of it, he spoils it by giving Typhon’s son the name of his
father? </DIV>
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<DIV>- Gerry Quinn</DIV>
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