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From: Michael Andre-Driussi <mantis@sirius.com> Subject: (whorl) RTTW spoilers, the Silken tongue Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2001 21:50:11 Wombat and Adam go on thusly: >on 2/13/01 8:05 PM, Kevin J. Maroney at kmaroney@ungames.com wrote: > >> To me, the giveaway that there's a huge amount of Silk in "the protagonist" >> from the moment that Horn moves into his body is the amount of minutiae >> that he displays about the religion of Pas and the Children while on the >> _Whorl_. > >Indeed; and not only his knowledge, but the sententiousness with which he >dispenses it. > >> I know the conversation about "what do you call it when you read the future >> from the flight of birds?" is with Pig, and I believe he does a full >> exegesis of an excerpt from the Chrasmological Writings before the scene >> Michael discusses. The Chrasmomancy in particular strikes me as being >> unmistakably Silk; in fact, while reading the novel I felt it was somewhat >> out of character for Horn to be so Silkian. I should know better..... >> >> Anyway, refresh my memory. Does the protagonist indulge in Chrasmomancy >> before he gives his eye to Pig? If so, I'd say that's strong evidence that >> he's largely Silk from the moment they merge. > >He does, in Chapter 12, with Olivine, an exegesis that takes several pages. >Very Silkian. But you GUYS! HEY! Your sense of SILK is from the BOOK written by HORN and NETTLE! Crikies! There was even a little cliffhanger between volumes 1 and 2 of TBOTLS where it was established that lil' Horn could mimic Silk--and that was years before he invested the energy of writing the book. You don't know Silk (none of us do!), you know litSilk. Anybody, take some character you know something about, and now act like that character. Like any trekkie can do "Kirk," or "Spock." People can do "Kramer" or "Elaine" or "Numan." Or "Frank N. Furter" or "Magenta." Or "Elvis." Got that part, okay: now on to the next part. Imagine that the biggest Elvis fan in the world suddenly found himself transported into the nearly dead body ("whoa, that was a close one!") of Elvis himself. Do you think he couldn't fake being Elvis? Crank it up a notch: make that fan the guy who wrote all of Elvis's songs, and taught him how to move and sing--the guy who created the Elvis that everybody else saw and heard. This has been an attempt to keep "what we know and how we know it" grounded in the text. Keep track of the frames. =mantis= Sirius Fiction Catalog and errata sheet at http://www.sirius.com/~mantis/ *This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun. *More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.moonmilk.com/whorl/ *To leave the list, send "unsubscribe" to whorl-request@lists.best.com *If it's Wolfe but not Long Sun, please use the URTH list: urth@lists.best.com