MDDM Ch. 70 Higher Assembly

[jbor]

on 18/8/02 12:22 PM, Doug Millison at millison at online-journalist.com wrote:

> 
> What about the imagination of a storyteller? We can easily conceive of a
> storyteller who manages to imagine himself looking down on a scene from a
> great height (from a high mountain peak, perhaps, or from God's position on
> high), no matter what technology is available in that historical period.
> 

While not discounting this additional possibility it's noteworthy that the
episode (and much of the narrative) is written in the present tense.
Compare, for example, how the tense shifts from present to past tense when
Wicks's tale-telling does interrupt the narrative (at 649.17 "Mason says",
and then when Wicks is announced as the narrative source it switches to past
tense: the "Discussion extended" 649.26). Other than that, the imagery used
in the passage - "the Hundred-League Current of *Sha*", the men journeying
into "Terrestrial Knowledge", the "Cycle" of life as an "Engine" - doesn't
seem to coincide with Wicks's worldview at all.

And I'd say it's unlikely that Wicks is the author of those obvious, though
fairly infrequent, anachronisms in the text either.

best