From: "Roy C. Lackey" 
Subject: Re: (urth) sepia man as Tilly?
Date: Sat, 10 Aug 2002 01:49:56 -0500

mantis asks:

>Roy, remind me about the Tilly subsection of the timeline.  Tilly died in
>1922 or so?  Wife "died" when?

Close enough. And his wife "passed on a number of years ago". (120) Probably
during The Great War.

>Is 1920 a good benchmark for natural sepia, for the clothing, for the
>Lombard reference?

Not for Lombard; as Robert has pointed out, her heyday was the 1930s.

>Both of these timeline paradoxes are "solved" if Charlie is a time-traveler
>from the past, like the ghost of Christmas past in "A Christmas Carol."  In
>PEACE terms, this =may= mean that Charlie Turner died and really is a
>ghost, and his visit of Weer is an example of a haunting from the past (as
>opposed to a haunting from the future), but I'm not going that far, yet,
>I'm just looking at Charlie as being a time-traveler who does =not= know
>the history of things, he has to go back to the past, live through events,
>and then move to the future to report what happened.

There's a problem with that. In "real-time" Charlie's visit/letter happened
in the early 1960s. If Charlie is a time-traveling ghost of the past, then I
presume he also has no knowledge of the future? In that case, how to account
for his contemporary reference to television? (221)

BTW, I haven't forgotten Robert's (or your earlier) quite valid query about
my take on the relevance of Doris's story to Weer or to the book--I just
don't have a good answer. I even dug out a 1729 translation of "Cinderilla",
taken from Perrault's collection. The parallels of Doris to Cinderella are
obvious, but so are the differences. I can't decide if that is important, or
if Wolfe just ignores the "facts" and recasts the story to suit his purpose,
as he did with the Sidhe story.

-Roy


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