Michael Andre-Driussi's Blog, page 4
July 28, 2024
New Free Product: Newsun's Word Hoard
Newsun’s Word Hoard
is a free download for Kindle users to see shortened definitions from Lexicon Urthus: A Dictionary for the Urth Cycle overlaid on the Kindle versions of books in Gene Wolfe’s New Sun series.
Newsun's is a Kindle dictionary based upon Lexicon Urthus (Second Edition, corrected 2014), with further notes and corrections (March 2022).
Please follow the link below to a page giving detailed information, including "how it looks" in action, and the unusual steps needed to download (physical cable required to sideload into the Kindle).
Newsun's Word Hoard page
Newsun's is a Kindle dictionary based upon Lexicon Urthus (Second Edition, corrected 2014), with further notes and corrections (March 2022).
Please follow the link below to a page giving detailed information, including "how it looks" in action, and the unusual steps needed to download (physical cable required to sideload into the Kindle).
Newsun's Word Hoard page
July 12, 2024
A Story: Complicating the Noble Savage (5HC spoiler)
Or, “Unraveling Utopian Elves-in-Space.”
Begin with the theory that, on the surface, each of the three novellas in The Fifth Head of Cerberus is a standard form with an additional twist: “The Fifth Head of Cerberus” is a science romance along the lines of Jules Verne, but the scientist turns out to be a Frankenstein slave-maker; “‘A Story’ by John V. Marsch” is an anthropological fiction that complicates the Noble Savage notion; and “VRT” is a Soviet prison tale that shifts into a mystery story that sort of validates the authorities.
Moving in to consider the second novella, for my purposes here, “Noble Savage” is a stock character type of an idealized person “uncorrupted by civilization,” and “anthropological fiction” is a mode wherein the scientist balances the established facts against the eternally idealized in order to provide a best understanding of a vanished people, “warts and all.” When “A Story” develops into the hill-boy Sandwalker’s coming-of-age ritual, it seems like a textbook case of a vision quest, paying out on the anthropological promise after the more mythological opening of sections 1 and 2. While the vision quest can be used as an onramp to the Noble Savage expressway, it is not necessarily so. Another strong anthropological strategy is the utter lack of shape-changing in “A Story,” which is surprising since shape-changing was the main feature of abos mentioned in the first story.
A topic that compromises the Noble Savage ideal is cannibalism, a subject that first appears in section 5 of “A Story” as a dire option given by Sandwalker to the Shadow children. This is when he requests a portion of the beast he had killed, threatening to kill and eat a Shadow child if this request is denied (84). However, this might be a bluff, along with the tough talk they give him in reply. In the course of section 5, Sandwalker becomes a Shadowfriend, adopted into their group.
Cannibalism returns with a vengeance in section 6, when Sandwalker finds marshmen using captured Shadow children to lure others to eat. As Sandwalker moves to rescue the captives, we are told, “twice as a child he had been hunted by starving men” (103), which suggests that the hillmen are periodically driven to eating their own children. When Sandwalker frees the Shadow children, they hunt marshmen to eat. Regarding their first such kill, the Old Wise One asks Sandwalker, “Will you eat this meat with us? As a shadowfriend you are one of us, and may eat this meat without disgrace” (107). This implies that there is shame involved: that Sandwalker would be shamed by eating a marshman, but this taboo is lifted by his status as a shadowfriend. This, in turn, validates some of the earlier taunting, that the hillmen eat their own children, which is shameful: “Men are not as you. Men do not eat the flesh of their kind” (84); when Sandwalker says a kinsman left a Shadow child’s head as a night-offering and the skull was stripped, suggesting that Shadow children ate it, they answer it was, “Foxes, or it was a native boy of his own get he killed, which is more likely (84).
It also implies that the Shadow children see hillmen and marshmen as the same.
Sandwalker makes a polite excuse and leaves without eating marshman flesh; which implies hillmen have a taboo against eating marshmen.
Later, section 9 finds him in the sand pit prison, where his relative Bloodyfinger proposes that they kill and eat the Shadow children among them (112). This establishes that the hillmen have no qualms about eating Shadow children. Sandwalker declares he will fight to defend them (113). This seems “noble” of him, but it is also a function of his alliance with them, his adoption or semi-adoption, his rescuing of them (which had a component of using their force to rescue his family group from enslavement): he has become a man of two-peoples.
Section 10 has the marshmen sacrifice two of Sandwalker’s kin and two Shadow children (122). Sandwalker objects to the latter as gratuitous, since the Shadow children were not part of the ceremony (it also reduces their force), but the marshman says, “They’re not people. We can eat them any time” (122). This seems to agree with the Shadow children view that there are only two types; but it also suggests that there are special times when marshmen can eat hillmen, or must eat them.
Thus, in tabular form:
Shadow children: can eat marshmen or hillmen at any time; but they never eat their own.
Marshmen: can eat Shadow children at any time and must kill (and eat) hillmen when stars are bad, as substitution for killing the high priest; when the stars are very bad, they kill (but do not eat) the high priest; but they never eat their own.
Hillmen: can eat Shadow children at any time; cannot ever eat marshmen; and with shame they eat their own children with alarming frequency.
The larger pattern reveals the Shadow children as the “universal eaters” and the hillmen as the “universal eaten.”
#
The three-party split finds some parallel to the situation in the Jack Vance novella “The Dragon Masters” (1963), in which there are two human kingdoms fighting, but there are also the human Sacerdotes. The kingdoms are cowboy medievals (who use genetic tinkering, but that is only relevant to “The Fifth Head of Cerberus”); the Sacerdotes are spooky elvish nudists (IIRC) who consider themselves the true humans and talk like they have higher technology. Looming in the background is a fourth group, the space invaders who periodically return (just like in “A Story”), and they show up in the end (just like in “A Story”).
#
Another topic that complicates the Noble Savage ideal is slave-making. The first tragedy in “A Story” is when one of the twins is abducted and their grandmother is murdered. This crime is later attached to the marshmen, who must use it to provide an heir for their high priest. Other than this highly specialized case, it does not seem like the marshmen habitually enslave hillmen, unless the stars are bad, as is the situation during the main part of “A Story.” Note that the hillman slaves are sacrificed in an attempt to satisfy the stars, which means they are sacrificed to prolong the life of the (formerly hillman) high priest. In contrast, the hillmen do not seem to take slaves; in fact, their drive is to keep their numbers down by abandoning their weak and helpless, as the case of Seven Girls Waiting and her baby in “A Story.” This calculated abandonment is so cruel that it makes slave-making look merciful by comparison.
“A Story” begins in a mythic mode as preamble to the anthropological fiction, but as the tale progresses, the developing picture is less idyllic and more nightmarish. As the story turns away from the Noble Savage as an entire class, it establishes a Noble Savage as a particular, in the person of Sandwalker. Sandwalker might be against eating Shadow children only because of his initiation as a Shadowfriend; but regardless of the mechanism involved, he is different in this way.
Begin with the theory that, on the surface, each of the three novellas in The Fifth Head of Cerberus is a standard form with an additional twist: “The Fifth Head of Cerberus” is a science romance along the lines of Jules Verne, but the scientist turns out to be a Frankenstein slave-maker; “‘A Story’ by John V. Marsch” is an anthropological fiction that complicates the Noble Savage notion; and “VRT” is a Soviet prison tale that shifts into a mystery story that sort of validates the authorities.
Moving in to consider the second novella, for my purposes here, “Noble Savage” is a stock character type of an idealized person “uncorrupted by civilization,” and “anthropological fiction” is a mode wherein the scientist balances the established facts against the eternally idealized in order to provide a best understanding of a vanished people, “warts and all.” When “A Story” develops into the hill-boy Sandwalker’s coming-of-age ritual, it seems like a textbook case of a vision quest, paying out on the anthropological promise after the more mythological opening of sections 1 and 2. While the vision quest can be used as an onramp to the Noble Savage expressway, it is not necessarily so. Another strong anthropological strategy is the utter lack of shape-changing in “A Story,” which is surprising since shape-changing was the main feature of abos mentioned in the first story.
A topic that compromises the Noble Savage ideal is cannibalism, a subject that first appears in section 5 of “A Story” as a dire option given by Sandwalker to the Shadow children. This is when he requests a portion of the beast he had killed, threatening to kill and eat a Shadow child if this request is denied (84). However, this might be a bluff, along with the tough talk they give him in reply. In the course of section 5, Sandwalker becomes a Shadowfriend, adopted into their group.
Cannibalism returns with a vengeance in section 6, when Sandwalker finds marshmen using captured Shadow children to lure others to eat. As Sandwalker moves to rescue the captives, we are told, “twice as a child he had been hunted by starving men” (103), which suggests that the hillmen are periodically driven to eating their own children. When Sandwalker frees the Shadow children, they hunt marshmen to eat. Regarding their first such kill, the Old Wise One asks Sandwalker, “Will you eat this meat with us? As a shadowfriend you are one of us, and may eat this meat without disgrace” (107). This implies that there is shame involved: that Sandwalker would be shamed by eating a marshman, but this taboo is lifted by his status as a shadowfriend. This, in turn, validates some of the earlier taunting, that the hillmen eat their own children, which is shameful: “Men are not as you. Men do not eat the flesh of their kind” (84); when Sandwalker says a kinsman left a Shadow child’s head as a night-offering and the skull was stripped, suggesting that Shadow children ate it, they answer it was, “Foxes, or it was a native boy of his own get he killed, which is more likely (84).
It also implies that the Shadow children see hillmen and marshmen as the same.
Sandwalker makes a polite excuse and leaves without eating marshman flesh; which implies hillmen have a taboo against eating marshmen.
Later, section 9 finds him in the sand pit prison, where his relative Bloodyfinger proposes that they kill and eat the Shadow children among them (112). This establishes that the hillmen have no qualms about eating Shadow children. Sandwalker declares he will fight to defend them (113). This seems “noble” of him, but it is also a function of his alliance with them, his adoption or semi-adoption, his rescuing of them (which had a component of using their force to rescue his family group from enslavement): he has become a man of two-peoples.
Section 10 has the marshmen sacrifice two of Sandwalker’s kin and two Shadow children (122). Sandwalker objects to the latter as gratuitous, since the Shadow children were not part of the ceremony (it also reduces their force), but the marshman says, “They’re not people. We can eat them any time” (122). This seems to agree with the Shadow children view that there are only two types; but it also suggests that there are special times when marshmen can eat hillmen, or must eat them.
Thus, in tabular form:
Shadow children: can eat marshmen or hillmen at any time; but they never eat their own.
Marshmen: can eat Shadow children at any time and must kill (and eat) hillmen when stars are bad, as substitution for killing the high priest; when the stars are very bad, they kill (but do not eat) the high priest; but they never eat their own.
Hillmen: can eat Shadow children at any time; cannot ever eat marshmen; and with shame they eat their own children with alarming frequency.
The larger pattern reveals the Shadow children as the “universal eaters” and the hillmen as the “universal eaten.”
#
The three-party split finds some parallel to the situation in the Jack Vance novella “The Dragon Masters” (1963), in which there are two human kingdoms fighting, but there are also the human Sacerdotes. The kingdoms are cowboy medievals (who use genetic tinkering, but that is only relevant to “The Fifth Head of Cerberus”); the Sacerdotes are spooky elvish nudists (IIRC) who consider themselves the true humans and talk like they have higher technology. Looming in the background is a fourth group, the space invaders who periodically return (just like in “A Story”), and they show up in the end (just like in “A Story”).
#
Another topic that complicates the Noble Savage ideal is slave-making. The first tragedy in “A Story” is when one of the twins is abducted and their grandmother is murdered. This crime is later attached to the marshmen, who must use it to provide an heir for their high priest. Other than this highly specialized case, it does not seem like the marshmen habitually enslave hillmen, unless the stars are bad, as is the situation during the main part of “A Story.” Note that the hillman slaves are sacrificed in an attempt to satisfy the stars, which means they are sacrificed to prolong the life of the (formerly hillman) high priest. In contrast, the hillmen do not seem to take slaves; in fact, their drive is to keep their numbers down by abandoning their weak and helpless, as the case of Seven Girls Waiting and her baby in “A Story.” This calculated abandonment is so cruel that it makes slave-making look merciful by comparison.
“A Story” begins in a mythic mode as preamble to the anthropological fiction, but as the tale progresses, the developing picture is less idyllic and more nightmarish. As the story turns away from the Noble Savage as an entire class, it establishes a Noble Savage as a particular, in the person of Sandwalker. Sandwalker might be against eating Shadow children only because of his initiation as a Shadowfriend; but regardless of the mechanism involved, he is different in this way.
June 29, 2024
“The Men Return”: Rare for Vance, Touchstone for Wolfe
“The Men Return” (1957) is a short story by Jack Vance that falls outside of the wide band he usually works within. It deals with the topic of widespread world change, the “ending of an Age,” and while it is a science fiction, it is bracingly experimental in making the abstract into concrete and turning the concrete into the abstract.
Here are the opening lines:
The character is paradoxically using insubstantial shadows as dark panels.
Looking ahead a bit to give more context, the “Relict” is a male human “of the old days” in a world gone mad ever since:
Note how Vance is using the scientific terms, where a “relict” is a surviving species of an otherwise extinct group of organisms. This “ending of an Age” looks more like the shift from Neanderthal Man to Cro-Magnon Man.
Picking up at the second paragraph, the picture further develops:
With these words, Vance captures the art mode of surrealism, evoking something like a montage of landscapes by Salvador Dalí. However, this heady flourish is followed by the sobering statement, “The Relict cared nothing for this: he needed food.”
Aye, there’s the rub: the new reality is a literal “dog-eat-dog” world, where underdog Relicts eat overdog Organisms, and vice versa. As we see in the next passage:
This appears to be the unique case of casual cannibalism in Vance’s work, but casual cannibalism is a touchstone for Gene Wolfe, with highlights at “Hero as Werwolf” (1975) and “King Rat” (2010), some thirty-five years later.
Back to the Vance, the Organisms in question are named Alpha and Beta (the Relict is named Finn). Alpha lies down and has a vision he reports to Beta, which includes the detection of the Relict nearby. Beta responds that there are only three or four Relicts remaining on the world. Alpha speaks another vision: “There will be lights in the sky.”
The vision passes, and Alpha stands up. Cue the quote:
The detail of ants crawling on an object seems like another direct reference to artwork by Dalí; the idea that Beta is a physical creature that Alpha conjured up pours a portion of magic into the bowl of surreal.
Alpha decides to eat the Relict, and the two engage in a back and forth that is nightmarish and semi-comedic, ending when Alpha accidentally collides with Beta and begins to eat him, at which point Finn joins in the feasting.
Alpha tries to tell Finn his vision of the lights in the sky, but Finn cannot understand his made-up language.
Finn tries to drag the corpse away to his group on the crag, but it dissolves, so he returns to the group empty handed. The group of five quickly suffers two deaths, and it looks like Finn will be next to die, when suddenly there is a light in the sky as the world changes back: “The sun. The sun has come back to Earth.”
Here the culmination matches the ending of “‘A Story’ by John V. Marsch” (1972); Alpha’s vision of “lights in the sky” as a mild hint at what will turn out to be a reality rending event (signified by, but not limited to, the return of the sun) seems similar to the singing of the Sky songs by the Shadow children abos (87, 129) and the apocalyptic result in which “the sky was open now, with nothing at all between the birds and the sun” (130), or more properly, the lights of the French starcrossers coming down from the sky (130). Needless to say, “‘A Story’” also has something like casual cannibalism.
So then, while “The Men Return” is a rare case of cosmic horror for Vance, it seems to present a treasured touchstone for Wolfe. I cannot recall another case of casual cannibalism in Vance’s work, but Wolfe returns to it repeatedly, more than the three times I have already listed. In addition, the way that “The Men Return” deals with the “ending of an Age” seems to have directly influenced Wolfe’s “ending of an Age” in “‘A Story’ by John V. Marsch.”
“The Men Return” is collected in a number of places:
The World Between and Other Stories (1965)
Eight Fantasms and Magics (1969)
Silverberg’s Alpha 2 (1971)
The Worlds of Jack Vance (1973)
Aldiss’s Evil Earths (1975)
Fantasms and Magics (1978)
Green Magic (1979)
Light from a Lone Star (1985)
Here are the opening lines:
The Relict came furtively down the crag, a shambling gaunt creature with tortured eyes. He moved in a series of quick dashes using panels of dark air for concealment, running behind each passing shadow, at times crawling on all fours, head low to the ground.
The character is paradoxically using insubstantial shadows as dark panels.
Looking ahead a bit to give more context, the “Relict” is a male human “of the old days” in a world gone mad ever since:
Earth swam into a pocket of non-causality, and all the ordered tensions of cause-effect dissolved . . . From the two billions of men, only a few survived—the mad. They were now the Organisms, lords of the era . . . . A handful of others, the Relicts, managed to exist, but only through a delicate set of circumstances.
Note how Vance is using the scientific terms, where a “relict” is a surviving species of an otherwise extinct group of organisms. This “ending of an Age” looks more like the shift from Neanderthal Man to Cro-Magnon Man.
Picking up at the second paragraph, the picture further develops:
Far away rose low hills, blurring into the sky, which was mottled and sallow like poor milk-glass. The intervening plain spread like rotten velvet, black-green and wrinkled, streaked with ocher and rust. A fountain of liquid rock jetted high in the air, branched out into black coral. In the middle distance a family of gray objects evolved with a sense of purposeful destiny: spheres melted into pyramids, became domes, tufts of white spires, sky-piercing poles; then, as a final tour de force, tesseracts.
With these words, Vance captures the art mode of surrealism, evoking something like a montage of landscapes by Salvador Dalí. However, this heady flourish is followed by the sobering statement, “The Relict cared nothing for this: he needed food.”
Aye, there’s the rub: the new reality is a literal “dog-eat-dog” world, where underdog Relicts eat overdog Organisms, and vice versa. As we see in the next passage:
Not too far away a pair of Organisms played—sliding, diving, striking flamboyant poses. Should they approach he would try to kill one of them. They resembled men, and so should make a good meal.
This appears to be the unique case of casual cannibalism in Vance’s work, but casual cannibalism is a touchstone for Gene Wolfe, with highlights at “Hero as Werwolf” (1975) and “King Rat” (2010), some thirty-five years later.
Back to the Vance, the Organisms in question are named Alpha and Beta (the Relict is named Finn). Alpha lies down and has a vision he reports to Beta, which includes the detection of the Relict nearby. Beta responds that there are only three or four Relicts remaining on the world. Alpha speaks another vision: “There will be lights in the sky.”
The vision passes, and Alpha stands up. Cue the quote:
Beta lay quiet. Slugs, ants, flies, beetles were crawling on him, boring, breeding. Alpha knew that Beta could arise, shake off the insects, stride off. But Beta seemed to prefer passivity. That was well enough. He could produce another Beta should he choose, or a dozen of him. Sometimes the word swarmed with Organisms, all sorts, all colors, tall as steeples, short and squat as flower-pots.
The detail of ants crawling on an object seems like another direct reference to artwork by Dalí; the idea that Beta is a physical creature that Alpha conjured up pours a portion of magic into the bowl of surreal.
Alpha decides to eat the Relict, and the two engage in a back and forth that is nightmarish and semi-comedic, ending when Alpha accidentally collides with Beta and begins to eat him, at which point Finn joins in the feasting.
Alpha tries to tell Finn his vision of the lights in the sky, but Finn cannot understand his made-up language.
Finn tries to drag the corpse away to his group on the crag, but it dissolves, so he returns to the group empty handed. The group of five quickly suffers two deaths, and it looks like Finn will be next to die, when suddenly there is a light in the sky as the world changes back: “The sun. The sun has come back to Earth.”
Here the culmination matches the ending of “‘A Story’ by John V. Marsch” (1972); Alpha’s vision of “lights in the sky” as a mild hint at what will turn out to be a reality rending event (signified by, but not limited to, the return of the sun) seems similar to the singing of the Sky songs by the Shadow children abos (87, 129) and the apocalyptic result in which “the sky was open now, with nothing at all between the birds and the sun” (130), or more properly, the lights of the French starcrossers coming down from the sky (130). Needless to say, “‘A Story’” also has something like casual cannibalism.
So then, while “The Men Return” is a rare case of cosmic horror for Vance, it seems to present a treasured touchstone for Wolfe. I cannot recall another case of casual cannibalism in Vance’s work, but Wolfe returns to it repeatedly, more than the three times I have already listed. In addition, the way that “The Men Return” deals with the “ending of an Age” seems to have directly influenced Wolfe’s “ending of an Age” in “‘A Story’ by John V. Marsch.”
“The Men Return” is collected in a number of places:
The World Between and Other Stories (1965)
Eight Fantasms and Magics (1969)
Silverberg’s Alpha 2 (1971)
The Worlds of Jack Vance (1973)
Aldiss’s Evil Earths (1975)
Fantasms and Magics (1978)
Green Magic (1979)
Light from a Lone Star (1985)
June 20, 2024
Infiltration: Mundane Medieval Style [The Devil in a Forest spoiler]
Having considered a cryptic infiltration model to The Fifth Head of Cerberus (1972), consider an explicit infiltration model for The Devil in a Forest (1976).
The Devil in a Forest is tricky for being a crypto “lost race” novel, where the race in question is a Norse outpost in Bohemia.
Mark is the main character, a teenager.
The character Wat is a charismatic highwayman, an ambiguous Robin Hood.
Jocellen is Mark’s girlfriend.
The setting is a village that is dwindling due to a chicken-and-egg situation: the trade of visiting pilgrims is fading while banditry and murder increase.
The forest around the village contains the ruins of a town named Grindwalled, a witch named Cloot, a population of charcoal burners who process wood into charcoal, and a prehistoric barrow mound.
In my commentary for chapter Twenty-Two, the final chapter, I discuss the mundane medieval infiltration at work in the background:
The burners have an idol they claim to be of the Virgin Mary; Wat says it might be of a Norse god; in the end it is revealed to represent the Barrow Man.
The Devil in a Forest is tricky for being a crypto “lost race” novel, where the race in question is a Norse outpost in Bohemia.
Mark is the main character, a teenager.
The character Wat is a charismatic highwayman, an ambiguous Robin Hood.
Jocellen is Mark’s girlfriend.
The setting is a village that is dwindling due to a chicken-and-egg situation: the trade of visiting pilgrims is fading while banditry and murder increase.
The forest around the village contains the ruins of a town named Grindwalled, a witch named Cloot, a population of charcoal burners who process wood into charcoal, and a prehistoric barrow mound.
In my commentary for chapter Twenty-Two, the final chapter, I discuss the mundane medieval infiltration at work in the background:
The [infiltration] conspiracy was decades in the making. The charcoal burners are presumably descendants of the town Grindwalled, a Viking settlement worshipping the Barrow Man. (I speculate that Grindwalled was smashed by a Christian king, perhaps Charlemagne during his war against the Saxons.) The burners financed Wat through seminary in order that he could take over the religious station of the village. Then as a bandit he whittled down the pilgrims, putting strain on the village, weakening it. When Jocellen was old enough to be a bride to the Barrow Man, the final phase was put into play, with more of the villagers killed. Clearly the charcoal burners were ready to move in as replacement villagers, and they would secretly live under their priest-king Wat, worshipping the Barrow Man. (Gene Wolfe’s First Four Novels: A Chapter Guide, p. 117)
The burners have an idol they claim to be of the Virgin Mary; Wat says it might be of a Norse god; in the end it is revealed to represent the Barrow Man.
June 7, 2024
Retracing the Roots of "The Just Man" (New Sun spoilers)
I recently was contacted by a Wolfe reader who, in the course of reading the Gospel of Mark, detected in the Parable of the Bad Tenants (collected in Matthew 21:33-46; Mark 12:1-12; and Luke 20:9-19) a pattern found in “The Just Man,” that tale told by Loyal to the Group of Seventeen in chapter 11 of The Citadel of the Autarch.
The reader was giving me this note and asking if I had made the same connection. I answered that in preparing the New Sun chapter guide entry on “The Just Man,” I had considered the Parable of the Bad Tenants, but I went with Psalm 37 as the stronger case.
Now I will go through the details.
The Parable is strong for the pattern of four repetitions, and for the escalation of severity (found in the Mark version) where the bad tenants beat the first servant, stone the second servant, kill the third servant, and finally kill the owner’s heir.
In “The Just Man,” the hero visits the capital four times, and while the evil men always beat him the same amount, it is the Group of Seventeen who escalates in their response, from an implied warning, to telling them to vacate the farm, to sentencing them to prison, so that the evil men anticipate a sentence worse than prison (in essence, death) as a result of the fourth petition.
But the Parable is a weak model for having a variety of victims, rather than a single just man; which leads to the endpoint, where the evil men are destroyed and the vineyard is given to someone else entirely (rather than them running off and the place going to the just man). That is to say, the Parable is about the eventual bad end of the bad tenants, not about one long-suffering victim who is rewarded.
So in the New Sun chapter guide I went with Psalm 37, for its emphasis on patience. While the Psalm is more abstract than the Parable, three of its verses, arranged in reverse order, give an appropriate overview to “The Just Man”: “The wicked plotteth against the just, and gnasheth upon him with his teeth” (12); “But the meek shall inherit the earth; and shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace” (11); “For yet a little while, and the wicked shall not be: yea, thou shalt diligently consider his place, and it shall not be” (10).
Psalm 37 has a pattern of five, wherein the memorable phrase “inherit the earth/land” appears five times (9, 11, 22, 29, 34). The repetition of phrases and images in the Psalm is conducive to the “Approved Texts” concept on display in “The Just Man.” There is also mention of “begging bread”: “I have been young, and now am old; yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread” (25), which matches how the just man (but not his offspring) begs for bread on his third visit to the city.
The Psalm also features a vanishing of the evil doers as a more explicit version of verse 10: “I have seen the wicked in great power, and spreading himself like a green bay tree. Yet he passed away, and, lo, he was not: yea, I sought him, but he could not be found” (35, 36).
Even though I went with Psalm 37 in the New Sun chapter guide as the strong single-source argument, a stronger argument can be made that “The Just Man” is a mashup of both Psalm 37 and the Parable of the Bad Tenants, where the Parable provides much of the form, but the Psalm provides the focus on the long suffering of a main character.
The reader was giving me this note and asking if I had made the same connection. I answered that in preparing the New Sun chapter guide entry on “The Just Man,” I had considered the Parable of the Bad Tenants, but I went with Psalm 37 as the stronger case.
Now I will go through the details.
The Parable is strong for the pattern of four repetitions, and for the escalation of severity (found in the Mark version) where the bad tenants beat the first servant, stone the second servant, kill the third servant, and finally kill the owner’s heir.
In “The Just Man,” the hero visits the capital four times, and while the evil men always beat him the same amount, it is the Group of Seventeen who escalates in their response, from an implied warning, to telling them to vacate the farm, to sentencing them to prison, so that the evil men anticipate a sentence worse than prison (in essence, death) as a result of the fourth petition.
But the Parable is a weak model for having a variety of victims, rather than a single just man; which leads to the endpoint, where the evil men are destroyed and the vineyard is given to someone else entirely (rather than them running off and the place going to the just man). That is to say, the Parable is about the eventual bad end of the bad tenants, not about one long-suffering victim who is rewarded.
So in the New Sun chapter guide I went with Psalm 37, for its emphasis on patience. While the Psalm is more abstract than the Parable, three of its verses, arranged in reverse order, give an appropriate overview to “The Just Man”: “The wicked plotteth against the just, and gnasheth upon him with his teeth” (12); “But the meek shall inherit the earth; and shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace” (11); “For yet a little while, and the wicked shall not be: yea, thou shalt diligently consider his place, and it shall not be” (10).
Psalm 37 has a pattern of five, wherein the memorable phrase “inherit the earth/land” appears five times (9, 11, 22, 29, 34). The repetition of phrases and images in the Psalm is conducive to the “Approved Texts” concept on display in “The Just Man.” There is also mention of “begging bread”: “I have been young, and now am old; yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread” (25), which matches how the just man (but not his offspring) begs for bread on his third visit to the city.
The Psalm also features a vanishing of the evil doers as a more explicit version of verse 10: “I have seen the wicked in great power, and spreading himself like a green bay tree. Yet he passed away, and, lo, he was not: yea, I sought him, but he could not be found” (35, 36).
Even though I went with Psalm 37 in the New Sun chapter guide as the strong single-source argument, a stronger argument can be made that “The Just Man” is a mashup of both Psalm 37 and the Parable of the Bad Tenants, where the Parable provides much of the form, but the Psalm provides the focus on the long suffering of a main character.
May 30, 2024
At Ultan's Library: Gene Wolfe and The Pocket Book of Science-Fiction
I wrote up a piece on how ten-year-old Gene Wolfe was shaped and formed after stumbling upon The Pocket Book of Science-Fiction (1943).
This is a highly specialized paper, not really a review of the book. It gives a very brief spoiler-filled synopsis of each story, and then looks into how Wolfe's own later fiction seems to have been influenced by that story. As such, it would be out of place as a Goodreads review, and it needs a wider audience than even this blog, so it is published over at Ultan's Library.
Here is the link: Gene Wolfe and The Pocket Book of Science-Fiction
This is a highly specialized paper, not really a review of the book. It gives a very brief spoiler-filled synopsis of each story, and then looks into how Wolfe's own later fiction seems to have been influenced by that story. As such, it would be out of place as a Goodreads review, and it needs a wider audience than even this blog, so it is published over at Ultan's Library.
Here is the link: Gene Wolfe and The Pocket Book of Science-Fiction
May 14, 2024
Happy Ending for 1984 [5HC spoilers]
Again, cautiously I proceed, believing there is a danger in applying anything from one of the novellas in The Fifth Head of Cerberus to one or both of the others. With that caveat out of the way, let me explore the potential provenance of “‘A Story’ by John V. Marsch” in light of the revealed situation in “V.R.T.”
“V.R.T.” gives us a Soviet model of crime and punishment which recasts “A Story” as being a work of rehabilitation rather than one of anthropology. I sketch some of this territory in “Appendix VRT8: A Soviet Model” (part of Gene Wolfe’s First Four Novels: A Chapter Guide), but I would like to expand it a bit here.
I believe “V.R.T.” is largely patterned on Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940). Koestler reveals in his novel that with the Soviet system, a court case could not advance to the show trial stage until after the prisoner had signed a false confession that had been crafted entirely by the authorities. This fantastical document of made-up crime is referred to as “The Grammatical Fiction,” and by definition it is not written by the prisoner, it is written by his jailers, in order to justify his pre-determined fate.
I pause here to note that George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) is really a “happy ending” version of Darkness at Noon. Be aware that there will be spoilers ahead for both 1984 and Darkness at Noon.
Robert Borski is on record arguing that prisoner 143 wrote “A Story” while in prison. I am on record arguing against that, both author and setting, but I will go through a steelman argument of what I think such a thing would look like, using elements I have already published, bending and combining them in service to this new task.
To prepare the way, I will engage in a long-delayed response to Borski’s “Marschian Sexuality” (2006), a brief article that detects in the Earth anthropologist Marsch a homosexual nature (The Long and the Short of It, 49). Borski notes that Marsch’s journal describes teenage Victor as “handsome in a rather sensitive way,” and that later entries show Marsch increasingly agitated by the idea that Victor might be sexually engaged with the suspected abo girl, an agitation that rises in intensity to the point Marsch writes about shooting them both if he catches them together. As telling as that is, for Borski, “the clincher is he reports in his journal that he’s noticed Victor is uncircumcised.”
This is the first I saw such an idea, and I applaud Borski for his textual detective work. I will build upon this, going in a different direction than Borski goes.
If a reader believes there are two distinct personalities in prisoner 143, it makes sense that there be differences to distinguish between the two, differences in voice that will appear in text. Both Marsch and Victor are male; one is in his twenties, the other a teen; one is highly educated, the other is barely educated; both are beardless. Totaling these up, they are practically twins, so a difference in sexual orientation could show which personality is writing a given sentence.
Borski assigns the misogynistic remark about Celestine Etienne to the Victor side (49), whereas I take this as expressing the Marsch persona, along with the other misogynisms, such as “Most medical men . . . [only] prolong the lives of ugly women” (5HC, 205).
By my reframing, prisoner 143 is ostensibly a misogynistic homosexual, yet during his extra-harsh time in the tomb-like underground cell he writes about dream women (5HC, 210-11) and a prostitute he hired on Ste. Anne (212). After this he gets positive reinforcement, being moved back to his original cell (231), being given the best food and a bath (231), and being given an intimate visit by Celestine Etienne (232). Then, when he is about to burn his uncollected notes, his jailers confiscate them (233).
This technique employed by the jailers to break him down is not special, it is their standard way, as declared by the letter: “We are pursuing the usual policy of alternately lenient and severe treatment to produce a breakdown” (242). Yet the resulting breakdown might actually serve to wean Victor of the Marsch persona; or to exorcise the Marsch spirit, in possession terms; or, in actor’s terms, to relegate the role into a mere mask. If Victor’s mother can shift between multiple roles, it shows the importance of not confusing a mask for the core.
One model I looked at in my chapter guide was that the government fears prisoner 143 is a human sniper disguised as an abo klutz (“Appendix 5HC2: A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing”). The opposite to this would be a sheep-in-wolf’s-clothing, which looks like Red Riding Hood in the belly of the wolf.
Returning to the Soviet model of “V.R.T.,” perceptive readers will have been arguing for nine paragraphs that “A Story” does not look like a Grammatical Fiction; it looks more like a fictionalization of a personal psychological reintegration, ending in the killing of an ogre and the subduing of a shadow twin. In a sense, this puts “A Story” in company with I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (1964), a famous fictionalization of a personal psychological reintegration. As such, consider this mapping of “A Story” to Victor’s point of view in “V.R.T.” (similar to the table in the aforementioned “Appendix VRT8”).
=A Story: V.R.T.=
Quest to become a man: expedition starts (find abos/mother)
Become a shadow friend: Marsch as patron (*)
The girlfriend (Seven Girls Waiting): the cat/abo girlfriend
Vision of mother in danger: clue in Roncevaux
Trip by river: starcrosser to Ste. Croix
The trap (capture by marshmen): murder of Number Four
The prison: #143
The family reunion in prison: the incoherent neighbor as mother
The girlfriend in prison: Celestine Etienne
The miracle: (black box**, reality breakthrough)
The execution of Last Voice: (black box, the killing of the ogre)
The switch: (black box, the subduing of the shadow twin)
* for “Become a shadow friend: Marsch as patron” I am especially struck by the parallel scenes where the hero, facing a threatening male, weeps and is comforted. In “A Story” this is where Sandwalker prepares to fight the intoxicated Shadow Child (5HC, 86); in “V.R.T.” this is where Marsch asks Victor what he will do when he is a man (5HC, 159), and six days later they talk about an anthropology book Victor has read (223). In addition, the way that the Old Wise One of “A Story” speaks in scientific jargon forms an unexpected link to Marsch-as-tutor; and Victor’s imitation of Marsch and Hagsmith swells their camp number to four, similar to the fluctuating number of phantom-like Shadow Children.
** by “black box,” I mean that science and technology term wherein an input goes into a black box and the black box emits a transformed output, but the internal working of the box remains mysterious and opaque. One explicit “black box” in “V.R.T.” involves the murder out in the field: we witness events leading up to that incident, and notes after the incident, but the incident itself remains mysterious and opaque.
Continuing beyond this mapping, the letter from the jailers to the junior officer names two solutions: execution of 143 as an agent of Ste. Anne; release of 143 as a scientist from Earth, “at least until he further incriminates himself” (241): in effect, the Darkness at Noon option (execution), or the 1984 option (release for eventual execution). In his response, the junior officer writes that neither is acceptable, and that, “Until complete cooperation is achieved we direct you to continue to detain the prisoner” (243). This “complete cooperation” sounds like the prerequisite for “Grammatical Fiction,” but it also could imply an implied third option, a “fork ending” of the sort promoted by Damon Knight (who, you will recall, grew Gene from a bean), where the third ending is not named but subtly foreshadowed. So, if the end result, the black box output, is the production of “A Story” (foreshadowed by appearing in the text before “V.R.T.”), then the implied off-the-page ending of “V.R.T.” is not a list of imaginary crimes to warrant 143’s execution as a sniper agent, but an anthropological romance to allow 143’s release as a scientist from Earth. Yet this is not the simple release of 143 as the 1984 option, it is a third way: to avoid the possibility that he “further incriminate himself,” the jailers must actively remake him as a scientist from Earth, if only as a stable role. According to my thought chains on Manchurian Candidates (ibid “Appendix 5HC2”), the government therefore must first determine that prisoner 143 is not, in fact, capable of being a sniper (i.e., an Earthman with proven skill at long range rifle use), but is an abo klutz.
Given that Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) is a “happy ending” version of Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, I hope I have made clear the likely stages required for an even “happier ending” in “A Story” as a rehabilitation document for prisoner 143. The “Grammatical Fiction” has turned into I Never Promised You a Rose Garden; the Soviet-style prison is revealed to be more like a healing mental health hospital, if only for this one exceptional case where the government finds itself in a bind.
“V.R.T.” gives us a Soviet model of crime and punishment which recasts “A Story” as being a work of rehabilitation rather than one of anthropology. I sketch some of this territory in “Appendix VRT8: A Soviet Model” (part of Gene Wolfe’s First Four Novels: A Chapter Guide), but I would like to expand it a bit here.
I believe “V.R.T.” is largely patterned on Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940). Koestler reveals in his novel that with the Soviet system, a court case could not advance to the show trial stage until after the prisoner had signed a false confession that had been crafted entirely by the authorities. This fantastical document of made-up crime is referred to as “The Grammatical Fiction,” and by definition it is not written by the prisoner, it is written by his jailers, in order to justify his pre-determined fate.
I pause here to note that George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) is really a “happy ending” version of Darkness at Noon. Be aware that there will be spoilers ahead for both 1984 and Darkness at Noon.
Robert Borski is on record arguing that prisoner 143 wrote “A Story” while in prison. I am on record arguing against that, both author and setting, but I will go through a steelman argument of what I think such a thing would look like, using elements I have already published, bending and combining them in service to this new task.
To prepare the way, I will engage in a long-delayed response to Borski’s “Marschian Sexuality” (2006), a brief article that detects in the Earth anthropologist Marsch a homosexual nature (The Long and the Short of It, 49). Borski notes that Marsch’s journal describes teenage Victor as “handsome in a rather sensitive way,” and that later entries show Marsch increasingly agitated by the idea that Victor might be sexually engaged with the suspected abo girl, an agitation that rises in intensity to the point Marsch writes about shooting them both if he catches them together. As telling as that is, for Borski, “the clincher is he reports in his journal that he’s noticed Victor is uncircumcised.”
This is the first I saw such an idea, and I applaud Borski for his textual detective work. I will build upon this, going in a different direction than Borski goes.
If a reader believes there are two distinct personalities in prisoner 143, it makes sense that there be differences to distinguish between the two, differences in voice that will appear in text. Both Marsch and Victor are male; one is in his twenties, the other a teen; one is highly educated, the other is barely educated; both are beardless. Totaling these up, they are practically twins, so a difference in sexual orientation could show which personality is writing a given sentence.
Borski assigns the misogynistic remark about Celestine Etienne to the Victor side (49), whereas I take this as expressing the Marsch persona, along with the other misogynisms, such as “Most medical men . . . [only] prolong the lives of ugly women” (5HC, 205).
By my reframing, prisoner 143 is ostensibly a misogynistic homosexual, yet during his extra-harsh time in the tomb-like underground cell he writes about dream women (5HC, 210-11) and a prostitute he hired on Ste. Anne (212). After this he gets positive reinforcement, being moved back to his original cell (231), being given the best food and a bath (231), and being given an intimate visit by Celestine Etienne (232). Then, when he is about to burn his uncollected notes, his jailers confiscate them (233).
This technique employed by the jailers to break him down is not special, it is their standard way, as declared by the letter: “We are pursuing the usual policy of alternately lenient and severe treatment to produce a breakdown” (242). Yet the resulting breakdown might actually serve to wean Victor of the Marsch persona; or to exorcise the Marsch spirit, in possession terms; or, in actor’s terms, to relegate the role into a mere mask. If Victor’s mother can shift between multiple roles, it shows the importance of not confusing a mask for the core.
One model I looked at in my chapter guide was that the government fears prisoner 143 is a human sniper disguised as an abo klutz (“Appendix 5HC2: A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing”). The opposite to this would be a sheep-in-wolf’s-clothing, which looks like Red Riding Hood in the belly of the wolf.
Returning to the Soviet model of “V.R.T.,” perceptive readers will have been arguing for nine paragraphs that “A Story” does not look like a Grammatical Fiction; it looks more like a fictionalization of a personal psychological reintegration, ending in the killing of an ogre and the subduing of a shadow twin. In a sense, this puts “A Story” in company with I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (1964), a famous fictionalization of a personal psychological reintegration. As such, consider this mapping of “A Story” to Victor’s point of view in “V.R.T.” (similar to the table in the aforementioned “Appendix VRT8”).
=A Story: V.R.T.=
Quest to become a man: expedition starts (find abos/mother)
Become a shadow friend: Marsch as patron (*)
The girlfriend (Seven Girls Waiting): the cat/abo girlfriend
Vision of mother in danger: clue in Roncevaux
Trip by river: starcrosser to Ste. Croix
The trap (capture by marshmen): murder of Number Four
The prison: #143
The family reunion in prison: the incoherent neighbor as mother
The girlfriend in prison: Celestine Etienne
The miracle: (black box**, reality breakthrough)
The execution of Last Voice: (black box, the killing of the ogre)
The switch: (black box, the subduing of the shadow twin)
* for “Become a shadow friend: Marsch as patron” I am especially struck by the parallel scenes where the hero, facing a threatening male, weeps and is comforted. In “A Story” this is where Sandwalker prepares to fight the intoxicated Shadow Child (5HC, 86); in “V.R.T.” this is where Marsch asks Victor what he will do when he is a man (5HC, 159), and six days later they talk about an anthropology book Victor has read (223). In addition, the way that the Old Wise One of “A Story” speaks in scientific jargon forms an unexpected link to Marsch-as-tutor; and Victor’s imitation of Marsch and Hagsmith swells their camp number to four, similar to the fluctuating number of phantom-like Shadow Children.
** by “black box,” I mean that science and technology term wherein an input goes into a black box and the black box emits a transformed output, but the internal working of the box remains mysterious and opaque. One explicit “black box” in “V.R.T.” involves the murder out in the field: we witness events leading up to that incident, and notes after the incident, but the incident itself remains mysterious and opaque.
Continuing beyond this mapping, the letter from the jailers to the junior officer names two solutions: execution of 143 as an agent of Ste. Anne; release of 143 as a scientist from Earth, “at least until he further incriminates himself” (241): in effect, the Darkness at Noon option (execution), or the 1984 option (release for eventual execution). In his response, the junior officer writes that neither is acceptable, and that, “Until complete cooperation is achieved we direct you to continue to detain the prisoner” (243). This “complete cooperation” sounds like the prerequisite for “Grammatical Fiction,” but it also could imply an implied third option, a “fork ending” of the sort promoted by Damon Knight (who, you will recall, grew Gene from a bean), where the third ending is not named but subtly foreshadowed. So, if the end result, the black box output, is the production of “A Story” (foreshadowed by appearing in the text before “V.R.T.”), then the implied off-the-page ending of “V.R.T.” is not a list of imaginary crimes to warrant 143’s execution as a sniper agent, but an anthropological romance to allow 143’s release as a scientist from Earth. Yet this is not the simple release of 143 as the 1984 option, it is a third way: to avoid the possibility that he “further incriminate himself,” the jailers must actively remake him as a scientist from Earth, if only as a stable role. According to my thought chains on Manchurian Candidates (ibid “Appendix 5HC2”), the government therefore must first determine that prisoner 143 is not, in fact, capable of being a sniper (i.e., an Earthman with proven skill at long range rifle use), but is an abo klutz.
Given that Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) is a “happy ending” version of Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, I hope I have made clear the likely stages required for an even “happier ending” in “A Story” as a rehabilitation document for prisoner 143. The “Grammatical Fiction” has turned into I Never Promised You a Rose Garden; the Soviet-style prison is revealed to be more like a healing mental health hospital, if only for this one exceptional case where the government finds itself in a bind.
May 8, 2024
A Tracing of Infiltration [5HC Spoilers]
I proceed with caution, believing there is a danger in applying anything from one of the novellas in The Fifth Head of Cerberus to one or both of the others. With that caveat out of the way, let me knit together the paradoxical union of Veil’s Hypothesis (from “The Fifth Head of Cerberus”) and Hagsmith’s “Verity” (from “V.R.T.”).
Veil’s Hypothesis goes something like this: shape-shifters on Ste. Anne, having killed all the French starcrosser people, “took their places and the ships” (23), so that all the people on the previously empty sister world of Ste. Croix are imitation humans. Let us first note that Veil’s is definitely a “pod-people” program: the shape-shifter can only imitate a person he or she has killed. In the majority reading, this is arguably the case for Victor; but it also implies that Victor’s mother has killed at least three people: a girl, a crone, and a beauty. Let us also note that Veil’s makes French families the most likely to be actually abo infiltrators.
Hagsmith’s statement, which I term a commonly-held “Verity,” is quoted here:
This “abo klutz” adage, seemingly necessary to the plot of “V.R.T.,” further complicates itself by defining as tools such diverse artifacts as shovels (per quote), rifles (for Victor), pens (for Victor), and dress buttons (for Victor’s abo mother). However, in a larger way it plays mischief with Veil’s Hypothesis in making all the faux-French colonists complete klutzes. But let us proceed with the supposition that the infiltration was more gradual than the “all at once” approach, allowing enough tool-use to build the original structures on Ste. Croix.
If this is true, it suggests that Ste. Croix has an “Eloi” caste of beautiful abo klutzes supported at essential levels by a “Morlock” caste of tool-using humans. To test this, tracking the seven cases of clones-at-large in the text (the four-armed mantis [59–60], the sweeper slave [61], the junior officer’s slave [137], the arresting trio [172], and Celestine Etienne [173], we see the clones at a variety of social stations. We observe that the arresting trio of the very secret police has a pistol among them, which seems to bolster the argument of tools for the competent, but I draw your attention to the junior officer at the planetary capital: his slave not only keeps the officer’s knife sharpened (140), but under direct order he uses the knife to cut the ropes on the dispatch box (137).
Given the “Running Blood” context, this tool-use seems significant, raising the possibility that the junior officer is an abo klutz: unable to sharpen a knife; unable to use a knife to cut rope; but covered by a master/slave protocol, complete with ritualistic slapping, operatic tears, and supine groveling.
Granted, the officer pens a letter (242–43), but we do not know the quality of his penmanship, and this long after he has admired the pages transcribed in “good clerical script” (164), i.e., written by a human. The officer is able to thread a tape recorder and operate it twice (139, 194), but perhaps the fact that a tape breaks on the second occasion (197) is due to his being a klutz.
“V.R.T.” has a couple of “Poe moments” on Ste. Croix that chill me with the Halloween weirdness that goes on without notice by the junior officer. By themselves these vignettes bring a “back of beyond” feeling from Ste. Anne straight into an urban setting on Ste. Croix, a hint that things are “abo weird” just below the placid surface, but now let us examine both incidents for tell-tale tool use. The first “Poe moment” is when the cemetery cat from Vienne intrudes (151), and the junior officer reaches for his pistol, but the cat leaps away before he can reveal his firearm skill, or lack thereof. The second “Poe moment” is when he notices a black bird has entered the room during his concentration (164), and when he tries to strike it with a broom, he significantly fails, whereupon he lets the bird stay.
If there is an Eloi/Morlock situation on Ste. Croix, then Hagsmith’s Verity, common on Ste. Anne, would be a state secret on Ste. Croix; and this seems to be the case. The plastic replicas of abo stone tools of Ste. Anne (10–11), used in the text to induce a debate between young David and Number Five, are the physical evidence of a lie, a forgery so convincing that neither boy in the debate says that abos cannot use tools. Number Five says the stone tools found are few in number because the abos mainly used non-stone tools like poison and nets (11); whereas David says they are few because their culture was more important to the abos (11–12). The simple, forged evidence of stone tools has effectively blocked off the whole concept of abos being klutzes.
In “The Fifth Head of Cerberus,” Number Five claims Dr. Marsch is an abo, or a half-abo; in “V.R.T.” the public of Ste. Anne believes all the abos were exterminated, so they take such claims of abos and half-abos as a joke. This suggests that on Ste. Anne, Veil’s Hypothesis would be a state secret to be kept from the general public. That is, the Running Blood extermination, whether it is actually true or not, is an essential element to the “common sense” of society on Ste. Anne; just as the faked abo tools are a crucial part of the “common sense” on Ste. Croix.
(As an aside, there is some irony on leadership roles on Ste. Croix: in “The Fifth Head of Cerberus,” Number Four laments his thwarted ambition of being a world leader; in “V.R.T.” it is revealed that at least three of his fifty clones are in the secret police. Seen together, these points suggest that the clone master is like the queen of an ant colony, focused only on the reproduction of tool-capable workers; while other specialized offspring serve as security agents.)
For a final observation, the Eloi/Morlock situation could explain the otherwise inexplicable naming conventions at Port Mimizon: street of sewers; street of maggots (eaters of the dead); street of charlatans (pretenders); the construction of a Cerberus statue (guardian of the dead) for 666 (the number of the beast). These infernal details could be cues of danger left behind by the earliest Morlock humans in an attempt to warn away humans visiting from other worlds.
Veil’s Hypothesis goes something like this: shape-shifters on Ste. Anne, having killed all the French starcrosser people, “took their places and the ships” (23), so that all the people on the previously empty sister world of Ste. Croix are imitation humans. Let us first note that Veil’s is definitely a “pod-people” program: the shape-shifter can only imitate a person he or she has killed. In the majority reading, this is arguably the case for Victor; but it also implies that Victor’s mother has killed at least three people: a girl, a crone, and a beauty. Let us also note that Veil’s makes French families the most likely to be actually abo infiltrators.
Hagsmith’s statement, which I term a commonly-held “Verity,” is quoted here:
Dr. Hagsmith: “No, not being really human . . . the abos can’t handle any sort of tool. They can pick them up and carry them about, but they can’t accomplish anything with them. That’s the test the French are supposed to have applied at the ford called Running Blood—stopped every man that passed and made him dig with a shovel.” (151)
This “abo klutz” adage, seemingly necessary to the plot of “V.R.T.,” further complicates itself by defining as tools such diverse artifacts as shovels (per quote), rifles (for Victor), pens (for Victor), and dress buttons (for Victor’s abo mother). However, in a larger way it plays mischief with Veil’s Hypothesis in making all the faux-French colonists complete klutzes. But let us proceed with the supposition that the infiltration was more gradual than the “all at once” approach, allowing enough tool-use to build the original structures on Ste. Croix.
If this is true, it suggests that Ste. Croix has an “Eloi” caste of beautiful abo klutzes supported at essential levels by a “Morlock” caste of tool-using humans. To test this, tracking the seven cases of clones-at-large in the text (the four-armed mantis [59–60], the sweeper slave [61], the junior officer’s slave [137], the arresting trio [172], and Celestine Etienne [173], we see the clones at a variety of social stations. We observe that the arresting trio of the very secret police has a pistol among them, which seems to bolster the argument of tools for the competent, but I draw your attention to the junior officer at the planetary capital: his slave not only keeps the officer’s knife sharpened (140), but under direct order he uses the knife to cut the ropes on the dispatch box (137).
Given the “Running Blood” context, this tool-use seems significant, raising the possibility that the junior officer is an abo klutz: unable to sharpen a knife; unable to use a knife to cut rope; but covered by a master/slave protocol, complete with ritualistic slapping, operatic tears, and supine groveling.
Granted, the officer pens a letter (242–43), but we do not know the quality of his penmanship, and this long after he has admired the pages transcribed in “good clerical script” (164), i.e., written by a human. The officer is able to thread a tape recorder and operate it twice (139, 194), but perhaps the fact that a tape breaks on the second occasion (197) is due to his being a klutz.
“V.R.T.” has a couple of “Poe moments” on Ste. Croix that chill me with the Halloween weirdness that goes on without notice by the junior officer. By themselves these vignettes bring a “back of beyond” feeling from Ste. Anne straight into an urban setting on Ste. Croix, a hint that things are “abo weird” just below the placid surface, but now let us examine both incidents for tell-tale tool use. The first “Poe moment” is when the cemetery cat from Vienne intrudes (151), and the junior officer reaches for his pistol, but the cat leaps away before he can reveal his firearm skill, or lack thereof. The second “Poe moment” is when he notices a black bird has entered the room during his concentration (164), and when he tries to strike it with a broom, he significantly fails, whereupon he lets the bird stay.
If there is an Eloi/Morlock situation on Ste. Croix, then Hagsmith’s Verity, common on Ste. Anne, would be a state secret on Ste. Croix; and this seems to be the case. The plastic replicas of abo stone tools of Ste. Anne (10–11), used in the text to induce a debate between young David and Number Five, are the physical evidence of a lie, a forgery so convincing that neither boy in the debate says that abos cannot use tools. Number Five says the stone tools found are few in number because the abos mainly used non-stone tools like poison and nets (11); whereas David says they are few because their culture was more important to the abos (11–12). The simple, forged evidence of stone tools has effectively blocked off the whole concept of abos being klutzes.
In “The Fifth Head of Cerberus,” Number Five claims Dr. Marsch is an abo, or a half-abo; in “V.R.T.” the public of Ste. Anne believes all the abos were exterminated, so they take such claims of abos and half-abos as a joke. This suggests that on Ste. Anne, Veil’s Hypothesis would be a state secret to be kept from the general public. That is, the Running Blood extermination, whether it is actually true or not, is an essential element to the “common sense” of society on Ste. Anne; just as the faked abo tools are a crucial part of the “common sense” on Ste. Croix.
(As an aside, there is some irony on leadership roles on Ste. Croix: in “The Fifth Head of Cerberus,” Number Four laments his thwarted ambition of being a world leader; in “V.R.T.” it is revealed that at least three of his fifty clones are in the secret police. Seen together, these points suggest that the clone master is like the queen of an ant colony, focused only on the reproduction of tool-capable workers; while other specialized offspring serve as security agents.)
For a final observation, the Eloi/Morlock situation could explain the otherwise inexplicable naming conventions at Port Mimizon: street of sewers; street of maggots (eaters of the dead); street of charlatans (pretenders); the construction of a Cerberus statue (guardian of the dead) for 666 (the number of the beast). These infernal details could be cues of danger left behind by the earliest Morlock humans in an attempt to warn away humans visiting from other worlds.
April 8, 2024
Next title
A Chapter Guide About The King In Yellow
[Not published yet. Coming soon.]
From the back cover: "A chapter guide about the bewitching, bewildering book by Robert W. Chambers. The King in Yellow (1895) inspired H.P. Lovecraft, but this guide is not about Lovecraft, it is concerned with The King in Yellow on its own terms. This means a close reading on each chapter. This means tracing the influences on Chambers in crafting this particular work: a little bit of Edgar Allan Poe; a triple shot of Ambrose Bierce; a smattering of Omar Khayyam; surprise visits by Browning, Chaucer, and a medieval forgery; a cameo or three by Ovid.
In addition to the Chapter Guide section, there is a set of Timelines, a list of Characters, a Trope List, a section on Bierce Stories, a section on a Poe Story, a quick guide to Chambers's 1894 novel In the Quarter, notes on the Further Adventures of Clifford and Elliott, reprints of two earlier articles (with updates), and a section on Theory, to say nothing of the enigmatic Mathoms."
March 8, 2024
Two Modes of Multiverse: Paratime vs. Dark World
Within genre, there are at least two different modes of multiverse: one where the multiverse is relatively mapped out, as in H. Beam Piper’s “Paratime” fiction (1948–65); and the other where the multiverse is unknown to all except the discerning reader, as in a cryptic series beginning with The Dark World (1946) by Kuttner and Moore.
“Paratime” is about a multiverse where time travel seems to happen as one visits a different universe where history followed a different route. For example, there is the “Aryan-Transpacific sector” where the Indo-Europeans went east, through Asia to North America. The point being that what looks like “time-travel” is actually dimensional travel (hence the term “paratime”), a distinction which deftly avoids time paradoxes. Access is by flying saucers. This multiverse is being patrolled by the Paratime Police, who right wrongs, but above all they preserve the secret of Paratime.
This mode is more science fictional, and Wolfe uses it in its “pioneer” form (i.e., a lone inventor creates a portal to another dimension) in a number of cases I will not list, to avoid spoilers.
In contrast, The Dark World is a case of a man from our world being drawn to another dimension through a portal he does not understand. The same sort of thing happens in the couple’s other novels Valley of the Flame (1946), Lands of the Earthquake (1947), The Mask of Circe (1948), and probably others. This device is used for a variety of subgenres: The Dark World explores a fantasy world of warring wizards; Valley of the Flame is a South American exploration adventure; Lands of Earthquakes has Crusaders in a trippy landscape that moves around a lot, making maps pointless; and The Mask of Circe is set in classical Greece.
This mode of multiverse is more “magical,” and Wolfe uses it in There Are Doors, at least. I will refrain from naming others.
To consider the situation in The Book of the New Sun, start with a provocative line from the BayCon audio-only interview (1982), where Wolfe says, “[People of Urth] have interstellar travel, which we do not have . . . [and] means of reaching parallel universes, which we do not have” (17:20).
BayCon interview (1982)
For context, this is limited to TBONS. “Interstellar travel” is clear enough, but “parallel universes,” in essence, “multiverse,” is tricky to parse. On the largest scale, it would definitely apply to the Briah/Yesod situation (a two-universe solution). Building on this by adding a more ambiguous area, it probably also includes the magic mirrors drawing and sending beings elsewhere (which might mean there are three universes, or wide open to many universes).
So far, so good: the lines between the different universes are clear, and egress across the barriers is possible only through elite machinery (a starship or magic mirrors).
But what if “multiverse” also applies where it is not expected? What if the Botanical Gardens of Nessus offers doorways to “paratime,” and there is no time travel in the Gardens at all? This would avoid time-paradoxes by casual visitors to the gardens, lest there be a “Sound of Thunder” disaster every week, if not every day. Because the barrier crossing is invisible, it seems like a Dark World mode; but because we know the architect is Father Inire, it has a “Paratime” feel to it for being choice locations selected among many, curated by an authority.
In that same interview, a few seconds later, Wolfe is talking about the energy weapons in use on Urth and how Severian lacks the technologist vocabulary to tell us whether they are masers or lasers. That is in play here, the lack of distinction between time travel and dimension travel; but with the gardens, the problem is on our side, as readers, since we recognize the 20th century in the jungle garden, whereas Severian definitely does not.
To back up: within TBONS I am trying to separate out the strands of “implies time travel” and “demonstrates time travel.” There is a big difference in access to a public park, and walking a certain maze at a certain time to reach the Last House; there is a big difference between a theme park seeming real, and the upper floors of the Last House looking out onto an ice age foretold. I am trying to establish how there might be a lot less time travel than initially thought; that the Botanical Gardens are something like training wheels, to get the reader prepared for the weirdness of the real thing.
“Paratime” is about a multiverse where time travel seems to happen as one visits a different universe where history followed a different route. For example, there is the “Aryan-Transpacific sector” where the Indo-Europeans went east, through Asia to North America. The point being that what looks like “time-travel” is actually dimensional travel (hence the term “paratime”), a distinction which deftly avoids time paradoxes. Access is by flying saucers. This multiverse is being patrolled by the Paratime Police, who right wrongs, but above all they preserve the secret of Paratime.
This mode is more science fictional, and Wolfe uses it in its “pioneer” form (i.e., a lone inventor creates a portal to another dimension) in a number of cases I will not list, to avoid spoilers.
In contrast, The Dark World is a case of a man from our world being drawn to another dimension through a portal he does not understand. The same sort of thing happens in the couple’s other novels Valley of the Flame (1946), Lands of the Earthquake (1947), The Mask of Circe (1948), and probably others. This device is used for a variety of subgenres: The Dark World explores a fantasy world of warring wizards; Valley of the Flame is a South American exploration adventure; Lands of Earthquakes has Crusaders in a trippy landscape that moves around a lot, making maps pointless; and The Mask of Circe is set in classical Greece.
This mode of multiverse is more “magical,” and Wolfe uses it in There Are Doors, at least. I will refrain from naming others.
To consider the situation in The Book of the New Sun, start with a provocative line from the BayCon audio-only interview (1982), where Wolfe says, “[People of Urth] have interstellar travel, which we do not have . . . [and] means of reaching parallel universes, which we do not have” (17:20).
BayCon interview (1982)
For context, this is limited to TBONS. “Interstellar travel” is clear enough, but “parallel universes,” in essence, “multiverse,” is tricky to parse. On the largest scale, it would definitely apply to the Briah/Yesod situation (a two-universe solution). Building on this by adding a more ambiguous area, it probably also includes the magic mirrors drawing and sending beings elsewhere (which might mean there are three universes, or wide open to many universes).
So far, so good: the lines between the different universes are clear, and egress across the barriers is possible only through elite machinery (a starship or magic mirrors).
But what if “multiverse” also applies where it is not expected? What if the Botanical Gardens of Nessus offers doorways to “paratime,” and there is no time travel in the Gardens at all? This would avoid time-paradoxes by casual visitors to the gardens, lest there be a “Sound of Thunder” disaster every week, if not every day. Because the barrier crossing is invisible, it seems like a Dark World mode; but because we know the architect is Father Inire, it has a “Paratime” feel to it for being choice locations selected among many, curated by an authority.
In that same interview, a few seconds later, Wolfe is talking about the energy weapons in use on Urth and how Severian lacks the technologist vocabulary to tell us whether they are masers or lasers. That is in play here, the lack of distinction between time travel and dimension travel; but with the gardens, the problem is on our side, as readers, since we recognize the 20th century in the jungle garden, whereas Severian definitely does not.
To back up: within TBONS I am trying to separate out the strands of “implies time travel” and “demonstrates time travel.” There is a big difference in access to a public park, and walking a certain maze at a certain time to reach the Last House; there is a big difference between a theme park seeming real, and the upper floors of the Last House looking out onto an ice age foretold. I am trying to establish how there might be a lot less time travel than initially thought; that the Botanical Gardens are something like training wheels, to get the reader prepared for the weirdness of the real thing.
