Date: Tue, 11 Jun 2002 07:23:12 -0500
From: Andrew Reeves 
Subject: Re: (urth) War With The Ascians as a Proxy War?

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:

> > That brings up another thought.  The Ascians are definitely baddies.
> > But if Erebus is, say Kim Il Song,
>
> Okay, whoa, hee-haw, stop right there. The analogy I was drawing
> there almost certainly does _not_ apply at the level of equating
> fictional character X to historical character X'. I was suggesting
> rather that Mr Wolfe's actual experience in such a proxy-war might
> make him more likely to portray such a war in his fiction, and
> pointing out some specific features that make me think that the
> war between the Commonwealth and Ascia is such a portrayal, and is
> colored by Mr Wolfe's experiences. But to try to draw character-level
> allegorical correspondences seems to me on about the level that tries
> to draw such correspondences from _The Lord of the Rings_ to World
> War II.
>

Yeah, it would be goofy to try to draw a 1:1 correspondence between the
imagery of BOTNS and anything happening here in the present.  Nonetheless=
,
if you've ever listened to Radio Pyongyang on short-wave (no, I don't
remember the frequency), it sounds creepily close to Loyal to the Group o=
f
Seven.  It seems that almost every other phrase is "Kim Jong Il wee dae
han soo ryong nim" (=3Dthe Great Leader Kim Jong Il) and a series of othe=
r
horrid totalitarian clich=E9s.

But no, there's no one to one correspondence, I was just sort of writing
down my ramblings.

Andrew

>
> --Blattid
>
> --


--