From: Spectacled Bear <spectacled.bear@pobox.com>
Subject: (urth) RE: (whorl) Copperhead (spoilers, with luck)
Date: Fri, 04 May 2001 18:53:21 +0100

At 18:15 2001-05-04, Blattid wrote:

>My first reaction to "Copperhead" was roughly equivalent to my first 
>reaction to several other Lupine shorts, notably the ever-present 
>"Suzanne Delage": "Huh?" 
>
>I'm not ashamed to say that I Don't Get It, and (unusual for me with 
>Wolfe) I'm not at all convinced that "it"'s there _to_ get. there's  
>bunch of stuff at the beginning that isn't followed up at all; I have 
>no idea why the woman with the strange voice from another dimension 
>behaves as she does; and the ending vaguely-out-of-Genesis simply 
>doesn't follow from the story in any way I can perceive. 

The Changer swaps things with cognates, i.e. rough equivalents.
The thing moving under the leaves is surely a Copperhead snake,
which has been swapped with a Serpent from another universe.
That also accounts for the identity of the man swapped for the
president - supreme leader, big boss - at the end, and of course
he's annoyed.

Things that confused me:

1. Are Boone and General Martens the same person?

2. Who gets murdered and why?

3. The dialect gets impenetrable at the worst possible moment
   - what do "groose" and "grawnt" mean?

Spectacled Bear.




>I suspect 
>the whole thing of being to some extent a venting of spleen at 
>Wm Jefferson Clinton, who doubtless has it coming, but would probably
>not have a clue that spleen had been vented at him.
>
>--Dan'l
>
>
>*This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun.
>*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.moonmilk.com/whorl/
>*To leave the list, send "unsubscribe" to whorl-request@lists.best.com
>*If it's Wolfe but not Long Sun, please use the URTH list: urth@lists.best.com


*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/