From: m.driussi@genie.com
Subject: (whorl) father & sun are one
Date: Tue, 18 Feb 97 04:54:00 GMT


[Posted from Whorl, the mailing list for Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun]

Reply:  Item #1485046 from WHORL@LISTS.BEST.COM@INET#

alga,

Well, to be honest about my motives and partisanship, I'm pretty sure
(hedgeword) that I like your Tartaros Rex theory because it works so
well in the Osiris mode!

But to give you the workout that you deserve . . . if Pas is just a
puppet, then who is fighting Echidna, and how, and why?  If Tartaros
can't use images because he's blind, then Tartaros cannot be the
puppetmaster, right?  So an accomplice, like Kypris, or, oh
Thelexiepeia (I got this new theory about her . . . I'm sure you can
guess), or maybe Kypris and Thel together.  Anyway, okay, we'll say
for the sake of your theory that some non-Tartaros agency does that
whole Punch and Judy, Pas and Echidna act on the wide screen tv for
the Cargo's viewing pleasure and edification (IV, 204-205).  If Pas
isn't real, then what are they using against Echidna?  And why didn't
Tartaros do any or all of this before, in the last few decades? (Or is
the Echidna in the Echidna-fighting-Pas scene a fake, too?)

(Another cool thing about Tartaros Rex is that, image-less, he moves
closer to the transcendent god . . . like Sphigx . . . and others
even more popular.  No more burning fig trees for this sky god!)

Then again, you know what I think of the Pas Pizzaman theory ("He Delivers!
Nine chiliads or the pizza is free!").  And I don't think the Cargo
is all riffraff--even though you might be excluding the Sleepers, I
think we can gauge Typhon's intentions more clearly with the Sleepers
than with the generational colonists.  Seems to me that the Sleepers
were chosen by slavers looking for beauty--it amounts to beautiful
Athenians being shipped away to the Island of the Minotaur.  Rather
than a Botany Bay (or actually worse--like Aushwitz), I sense that
Typhon was trying for a Xanadu.  ("Monarch Typhon, you've just added
Urth to your kingdom and are well on the way to re-establishing the
galactic empire--what will you do next?" "I'm going to Disneyplanet!")

Hey, look!  By talking about the end we've ended up at the beginning.
We struggle to define the Mission of The Whorl: a two hundred year
(subjective) journey, one way, to establish a colony for the glory of
the Monarch; or a food delivery, in exchange for payment difficult to
imagine (unless, in a slightly circular manner, the inhumi sold Typhon
the  Mainframe and the software in exchange for a boatload of bathing
beauties and hunky hunks?).

(Imagine the culture rift on Blue between the generational colonists
and the Sleepers!  Can't wait for the Short Sun series!)

=mantis=

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