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<DIV style="font-color: black"><B>From:</B> <A
title=andrew.mason53@googlemail.com
href="mailto:andrew.mason53@googlemail.com">Andrew Mason</A> </DIV>
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In any case, Wolfe fairly clearly rejects this view in the author's<BR>> note
to 'La Befana' - while the story itself does turn on the idea<BR>> that
Christ must be born anew on different planets, it's made clear<BR>> that this
is a joke. On the other hand, the way he puts it suggests<BR>> that he _may_
actually think the principle is true for universes.<BR><BR>What does he
say, exactly? I read ‘La Befana’ online but it had no author’s
intro. [My thought was that the mistake of La Befana might be to be
looking among the human colonists rather than among Zozz’s people.]</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">Aside
from the issue of looking in dogma -either of one’s own religion or the dogmas
assumed to be asserted by the author – for interpretations of an SF saga, which
I believe to be a questionable approach to literary analysis, the idea of a
single Incarnation in iterated, slightly improving universes seems rather
problematic on logical grounds.</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">The
“Failed Jesus” of every previous iteration is just one problem. What about
iterations *subsequent* to the one with the Incarnation? Either that is
the last iteration (which is nowhere suggested) or the subsequent iterations are
better than that one... and yet they also must have some sort of Failed Jesus or
Post Jesus rather than the one true Jesus Christ. How can that
be?</DIV></DIV>
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<DIV
style="FONT-STYLE: normal; DISPLAY: inline; FONT-FAMILY: 'Calibri'; COLOR: #000000; FONT-SIZE: small; FONT-WEIGHT: normal; TEXT-DECORATION: none">Also,
if ours is the final, perfect iteration... well, it seems like it ought to be a
little bit better, doesn’t it? Really, the universe of Urth despite
various SF horrors doesn’t seem especially terrible compared to our imaginings
of this one, or even our history.</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">-
Gerry Quinn</DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></BODY></HTML>