From: Dan Parmenter <dan@lec.com>
Subject: (urth) living a score
Date: Fri, 10 Jul 1998 14:37:06 

From: m.driussi@genie.com

>With that out of the way--Inire as regent: what a dumb idea!  Poor
>little wry-neck Inire, ancient and twisted!  They only live a score
>of years!  (That's 20, for you ultramoderns--so Inire is what, 19 or
>21 already?)  Serving autarchs since Ymar, skipping through the
>corridors of time!  All reinforcing the notion that the trip to Yesod
>was thought to take less than a year.

Surely not *all* Hierodules only live to be 20.  I seem to recall we
only hear that of Famulimus and Barbatus.  What about the Cumaean?

BTW, on an unrelated point, do people assume that the advanced tech of
the Extra Solaraians is of a sort that can essentially allow for a
spaceship of any shape?  If so, is the ship of the Hieros we see
hovering over Baldanders' castle intended to look like a standard
Flying Saucer (which is how it is described) so that it will influence
the past's perceptions/expectations of how extraterrestrial crafts
should look?  Wolfe has admitted to having some fondness for UFO books
(In the intro to STORYES).  I've always been fascinated by the fact
that image of a "saucer" apparently was apparently originally invoked
by Kenneth Arnold to describe the *motion* of what he saw, not its
shape.  I believe that disc-shaped UFOs had been reported before, but
I'm assuming that the modern conception of the "flying saucer" is a
1950's thing and this seems to be what Wolfe is tapping into, complete
with bug-eyed monster crews, etc.  Perhaps if he'd grown up in the
post-Strieber age he'd be describing them differently.

D


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