Date: Mon, 06 May 2002 21:02:54 -0500
Subject: Re: (urth) 5HC: Shadow Children in the Lupiverse?
From: Adam Stephanides 

on 5/6/02 11:20 AM, Tony Ellis at LittleSense@necronomicon.co.uk wrote:

> No? :-) I find the idea of 'A Story' as fiction incredibly sterile. Saying
> that Victor was trying to "know himself" may tell us why Victor wrote it,
> but it doesn't tell us why Wolfe did.

To indicate something about Victor's character, perhaps?

If the only purpose of "A Story" is to tell us about the prehistoric
colonizations and the Shadow Children's shield, then having it take up sixty
pages is a waste of space, whether it's true or not.

> Why waste his time and ours encoding
> all that information about which was the indigenous race and which the
> alien, and keep coming back to it and coming back to it throughout the
> story, and make us work so hard to piece it all together, if we're not
> supposed to take it seriously?

To say that we're not supposed to believe it is not to say that it doesn't
play an important role in the novel, either as Victor's invention or as an
Annese myth.  Ambiguity over who is human and who isn't is a major theme of
5HC.

--Adam


--