From: "Robert Borski" 
Subject: Re: (urth) Crush's Page and Quetzal
Date: Wed, 28 Aug 2002 19:12:56 -0500

> >Crush, have you met Robert Borski? You're both gifted with imagination
> plus,
> >and should have much to discuss.
> >-alga

> I've never met Robert Borski, although I enjoyed his recent Peace article.
I
> haven't to my knowledge met anyone on this list, although it is my desire
to
> go to WorldCon one day and put a few faces to the names here.

(Extending a right hand blithely across the aether.) How do you do, Crush!

I've never met anyone on the list either, although Nigel Price and I talked
about getting together last spring; alas, while he was in the American
Midwest, I was in Central Europe. That being said, however, I fear you've
misread alga's comments, which were intended not as a suggestion that you
and I actually meet, but that your work, like mine, is neither valid nor
substantive, but rather falls into the realm of "fan fiction." Like me,
you've apparently been "swimming with undines," thus your severe
intellectual anoxia. Thank the stars she didn't call you my "partner in
flakiness," like she did Prion (aka Sean Whalen), who promptly left the list
after the tirade she leveled against him. And heaven forbid your work ever
find acceptance elsewhere; I fear the six essays I wrote on Wolfe that have
been published by The New York Review of Science Fiction have forever
sullied its reputation (obviously Ms. Turner's essays on John Crowley were
accepted by an editorial cadre in much more command of its critical
faculties). In other words expect a certain amount of ridicule, scorn, and
derision to your Long Sun exegeses by what is, thankfully, not a large
contingent on the list; if you're extremely unlucky, however, as I've been,
expect a fair amount of shrillness from you-know-who.

Personally, I applaud your efforts. I don't agree with many of your
conclusions, but rather than take a cheap shot at what has obviously been a
labor of love, with a fair amount of scholarship  ("Those who have original
thoughts, post; those who don't, carp"), I thought I'd ask you a few
questions about your Hyacinth essay. According to you she's a chem. So does
this mean that she fabricated the story about her father being a head clerk
at the Juzgado? (Newt by my reckoning.) And again, is she lying (or
implanted with false memories) when she tells Auk that her father is a
"pig's arse"? And who is the woman described as her dead mother that
Hyacinth sees at Mainframe? Nettle seems to know her (I've theorized
elsewhere she's Lime), but wouldn't she have to be a chem--as must be her
father? Simply put, are there really that many chems running around outside
the military and the religious orders, and are they as prone and subject to
toxic parenting as your average bios? Since you're speculating about someone
whose life history does not end with SHORT SUN, you also need to read
Wolfe's followup series because there's an event in there that makes your
theory even lesss tenable. I won't spoil it for you; suffice it to say I
don't think rust is the causitive agent.

Robert Borski



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