From: Sheila Herndon <skherndon@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: (whorl) Re: those darned ambiguities
Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 18:07:08 



--- whorl-errors@lists.best.com wrote:
> From: Alastair Reynolds
> How does Mucor's possession ability work? Maybe I
> missed something
> (very likely) but it seems hard to rationalise her
> talent with an
> underlying SF-nal explanation, in the usual Wolfe
> manner. I probably
> need to re-read TBOTLS...

<relatively new subscriber delurking for a question>

At WindyCon, GW mentioned at one of his panels
that He purposefully put a ghost into the middle
of one of his novels so that the reader would
not expect only science fiction from the novel.
(The panel was about mixing the genres).

So perhaps he is mixing sf and the supernatural.

But I don't really know, and just wanted to throw
that out there to see what other people think.

When I first read TBLN I thought the Outsider
god was supernatural, and the others were
technological, but that is probably naive.


...About the Inhumuni secret. I agree with
whoever said that the love-thy-neighbor angle
doesn't seem to be a good candidate because of
the impossibility of implementation. If something
were impossible to implement, then I don't think
they would consider it a threat. 

But the love-thy-neighbor theory is still
intriguing and something has to be there. All of
the technologically oriented ideas so far seem
hokey.

One offshoot of the love idea is to love the
inhumuni. Maybe this is what saves Horn. Krait
drinks his blood, and then Horn loves him. Most
people wouldn't. Maybe that's the secret. So it's
a bigger version of love-thy-neighbor (what *is*
thy neighbor).

*Except* that, again we have the implementation
problem (even if maybe it isn't so difficult, 
people can protect themselves and it doesn't depend
on the actions of other people), and if blood taking
is required, what protection is there against
inhumuni who would kill their first time victom
outright?

<back to lurking, don't even have a name.>

sh
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