.
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the suppression of Whitemarsh: This and the related witch-cults were based on the Albigensian Crusades against the Cathars.
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the maggot in the skull: A maggot is not only a larval fly, but also a whimsical notion, derived from the folk belief that an irrational person literally had maggots in their brain.
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the Third Unification: Of this phase of the Prosperan System’s long and tangled history, I know nothing.
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barnacle flies: A dimorphic name: in Great Winter a barnacle and in Great Summer a fly.
Rose Hall: Rose Hall, Jamaica, is known for the legend of White Witch, Annie Palmer, a slave owner even crueler than most of her kind, who was purportedly trained in voodoo.
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sleeve job: A crude folk joke in which the sleeve job is described as a sex act of extreme perversity and effectiveness—yet whose specific workings are never described. The term has since been appropriated for various sexual acts of greater or lesser likelihood.
Caliban: Miranda’s larger moon, inhospitable to life and used primarily to house prisons and military training camps.
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TERMINAL HOTEL: This is an inside joke. There used to be a shabby hotel across from the Reading Terminal in Philadelphia. The sign over its door simply read TERMINAL. Gardner Dozois was once filmed crossing the street in front of the Terminal Hotel for an incidental scene in Brian de Palma’s movie, Blow Out. Unhappily, the footage ended up on the cutting room floor.
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Two television sets were wedged in the sand, one with the sound off, and the other turned away: When I first came to Center City in Philadelphia, I couldn’t afford to buy a television. So I went out on trash day and hauled every TV set I found back to my apartment. I yanked the vacuum tubes (this was before printed circuits) and took them to Radio Shack, which had a tube tester, and bought new tubes. This resulted in two sets, one of which had good sound and the other a good image. I stacked one on top of the other and the rest went back to the curb.
Sex, magic, and television are thematic in Stations of the Tide, as intangible technologies whose main effects are achieved inside the human brain.
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the System government: A small joke here. Prospero and its attendant planets make up the Prosperan System. But the government is the System.
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wands and orchids: Male and female genitalia.
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“All is pattern”: This is one of the major themes of Stations, along with the universality of change. I feel close to embarrassed for pointing out something so obvious.
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haunts: This is the first mention of the aboriginal people who possessed Miranda before the coming of humans and the guilt for whose possible extinction haunts Mirandan society. The name is derived from the “haints” of African-American folklore.
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Ariel: Miranda’s lesser moon.
Ararat: The resting-place of Noah’s Ark. Also the first human city on Miranda, long since abandoned and lost.
*
John Fowles's novel A Maggot is concerned with the non-dipteran meaning of the word. It's the only of his novels that comes close to being science fiction (in an ambiguous way) - an apparent extraterrestrial (or possible time-travelling) vehicle is referred to by one of the characters as "a maggot" (for want of some other word to describe it, as I recall). But the word in this novel primarily refers to the mental quirk, although whether this is the author's or the characters' is left to the reader.
ReplyDeleteFor what it's worth, it's the only SF-adjacent work that I know of concerned with the beginning of the Shaker movement.
I've only ever encountered the phrase sleeve job in Robert Nye's extremely horny Merlin, is that a book you are familiar with?
ReplyDeleteThanks for these notes, I've always loved your work and this has inspired me to fill in the gaps (I've only read vacuum flowers, IDD and this one). Where would you recommend i start with the remainder?
A) No, I'm not.
ReplyDeleteB) You should pick up a collection of my short fiction. THE DOG SAID BOW-WOW might be the best.