From: "Alice K. Turner" 
Subject: Re: (urth) TBOTSS and colonialism
Date: Wed, 22 May 2002 20:36:09 -0400



From hartshorn:

(a lot snipped)
>
> Look, fiddle-faddle PC about "racism" is far, far,  below understanding
what
> Wolfe is attempting.
>
> The whole moral point is that there *is* a vast biological difference.
>
>
> Love may perhaps redeem the most evil human being.
>
> But in the Lupiverse love must try to redeem something far worse - an
> inhumi.
>
> If the inhumi were not intrinsically evil, intrinsically far worse than
the
> worse human being, **this would have no meaning at all**.
>
> There is this attempt to extend the matrix of human love to the inhumi,
and
> there is its failure.
>
> If the ihnumi were just human beings in drag, neither the attempt nor its
> failure would have any special meaning at all.
>
> Surely, surely, you must see this?

Surely, surely, I do. And I'm even offended at the attempt to drag the Jews
into this. Wolfe, I think, would hit the ceiling at such a ham(heh!)fisted
interpretation. Look, we're talking spiritual here, and on some level it
isn't too complex. I was disappointed that no one complimented my Jonas-like
invocation of the scorpion and the frog, but that in the end is the
inhumi-human situation. Even Quetzal--remember him?-- who was perhaps as
much of an inhumu saint as Silk a human one--could not help his nature. Fava
preys on granny, though she'd prefer not to.

The book (I mean, of course, the three books) is about many other things,
about parents and children, about the divided soul, but most of all, I
maintain, it is about a pilgrim's progress, and the allusion is entirely
intentional. There are devils and angels in this book. (I prefer to call
them demons and cherubim, but I'm not getting much of a response.) There is
a flawed and divided human (or two) trying to cope rather biblically at
times, as when he becomes Solomon, harem and all. Even the awful racial
caricatures, that we have all deplored a bit, are a way of saying: look,
it's all of us; we're in it together. The races of the earth, the angels,
the demons, the terribly troubled heroes. He's laying a simplistic world out
in rather broad terms and sending his pilgrim(s) through it.

The interesting point, to me, is whether the inhumi can really be considered
"evil." In a debate, I'd enjoy taking the side that they are not. And that
Wolfe shows the humans, who do not have their needs and nature, as more
evil.

-alga




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