From: David_Lebling@avid.com
Subject: (whorl) Black Hole Series -- I hope not!
Date: Tue, 12 Oct 1999 16:41:28 



Lots of the speculations engendered by Kevin Maroney's hints (and some before
that -- it isn't his fault) revolve around what I call the Black Hole Series
philosophy.  That is, Urth is Green (or Blue), Blue is St. Anne, Silk is
Severian, Seawrack is Merryn, Horn is Silk's cousin, Horn is Severian's second
cousin twice removed, Marble is Jonas, and so on, until every detail of the
author's earlier works is sucked into the black hole of the current one.

In these sorts of series, it turns out everyone is related to everyone else, all
the mysteries are cleared up by connecting them with chains of infodump to all
the other mysteries, gods fly down from the ceiling on wires, galactic
conspiracies are exposed, and the whole enterprise is revealed to be a shaggy
dog story.  Asimov's attempt to spot-weld the Robot stories to the Foundation
series is the Milli Vanilla poster-child-classic of this genre, and Niven's
"Down in Flames" is the intentional _reductio ad absurdem_.

With all due respect to those who are speculating along these lines, that isn't
gonna be what Wolfe is doing here.  He's too good a writer for that.

I hope.

     -- Dave Lebling
     (aka vizcacha)



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