From: John Bishop <jbishop@zko.dec.com>
Subject: (urth) Re: Narnia/TAD [Digest urth.v030.n159]
Date: Thu, 02 Aug 2001 14:00:45 

Personally, of the Narnia books I prefer _The_Magician's_Nephew_,
because it has that wonderful vision of a dying world, and because
the Empress castigates the English, "You treat your slaves poorly",
to which they reply "But they aren't slaves".  That exchange could
make a middle-class child of the time _think_ about the status of
the working class.

But which ever book is your favorite, they're clearly in the short
list of "possible best juvenile fantasy of the 1900s".

In _There_Are_Doors_, the death-after-intercourse requires that
all women either bear twins or triplets or store semen for later
pregnacies (as many insects do).  Otherwise the species dies out.
How you would evolve such a system is hard to figure out, and
there's no implication that _this_ is how mammals work in this
world.

The evolutionary wierdness of the idea, coupled with the non-wierdness
of it as one psychotic's belief about sexuality, seemed to me to be
a hint that the "hero" is _not_ in such a world--he's in our world,
but he is insane.

	-John Bishop

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