Date: Mon, 6 May 2002 17:02:27 +0000 (GMT)
From: Josh Geller 
Subject: RE: (urth) 5HC: Shadow Children in the Lupiverse?



On Mon, 6 May 2002, Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:

>                                                            ... It's
> pretty clear why the story of Dr. Death is present in "The Island of
> Doctor Death and Other Stories"; it's a little less clear why the
> "brown book" stories are present in tBotNS, but there's no doubt in
> anyone's mind that they're fiction and that they're there for a good
> and sufficient reason.

They are not just fiction: they are myth. They express patterns of history
in easily understood and transmissible terms.

'The Story Of The Student And His Son' is (among many other things) the
story of the Monitor and the Virginia (the Merrimac: from the US civil
conflict of the 1860's) overlaid upon the story of Theseus.

The one about the wolves and 'Fish and Frog' is (again, among many other
things) an interplanetary war overlaid on the founding myth of Rome.

And in what we are please to call 'our world' the story of Alexander gets
overlaid upon the story of Gilgamesh.

Wolfe is one of the very few modern writers who really understands the
process by which this happens. Jack Vance is another.

They are both very much aware of how ancient the human species is, how far
back its memories go.












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