From: "Alice Turner" <al@interport.net>
Subject: (urth) Re: Digest urth.v003.n013
Date: Sun, 10 Aug 1997 14:32:28 


[Posted from URTH, a mailing list about Gene Wolfe's New Sun and other works]

Hmmmm. 

mantis, I don't think Cutthroat or the Sleigh-ers are bent on a vegetarian
democracy (yes, I know you were joking, but I'm making a point). When they
lay taboos/wisdom on the Panigaku, they counsel them to beware of the
birds' eggs in the nests that have adapted to the snow-bowed boughs, they
don't tell them to stop their traditional hunting. One would assume their
advice to the other meat-eaters was similar. Only Cutthroat himself sees
the prey animals in human form, and I cannot see dietary habits radically
changing. (It's the Panigaku, who do not, so far as I know, attack deer, 
who are seen walking with "Lenizee and his wife and child," not the
Wiggikki!)

I think this is sort of important, in re your very interesting comparison
with creepy technology on Urth. With all our talk of violence on this
planet, we've never once addressed the workaday, straightforward butchery,
on a truly large scale, that Silk and the mayteras and other pateras on the
Whorl engage in. I've certainly thought about it--in a longago post I
speculated on the sacrifices as a practical way of getting protein to the
poor. But it's certainly a point worth making that you (in particular) have
made a point of the violence on this planet, comparing it to Lindsay (I do
not disagree, though I did defend survival killing), but all of us have
more or less cooed over Silk (as opposed to Sevarian), who performs
large-scale butchery routinely. The difference is only in the way the
author describes them. No matter how Ratty may identify in guild-brother
mode with Silk, I'll bet he'd be rattled at having to take knife in hand
each Sabbath for such a task.

-alga-