There are 3 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1a. TheSilent Race
From: Nicole Valicia Thompson-Andrews
1b. Re: TheSilent Race
From: Padraic Brown
1c. Re: TheSilent Race
From: Tony Harris
Messages
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1a. TheSilent Race
Posted by: "Nicole Valicia Thompson-Andrews" goldyemo...@gmail.com
Date: Tue Aug 6, 2013 10:48 pm ((PDT))
I once had a dream where I was at a place with doors lining a wall. Each
door had a country behind it.
Two of the countries were talkative vountry and silent country. I just saw
an episode of Evil Twins describing the twins know as the Silent Twins due
to their selective mutism.
My question is could that apply to a race? If so, how would that work?
In other words, could it be a natural phenomenon?
Mellissa Green
@GreenNovelist
Messages in this topic (3)
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1b. Re: TheSilent Race
Posted by: "Padraic Brown" elemti...@yahoo.com
Date: Wed Aug 7, 2013 6:01 am ((PDT))
> From: Nicole Valicia Thompson-Andrews <goldyemo...@gmail.com>
>
> I once had a dream where I was at a place with doors lining a wall. Each
> door had a country behind it.
In the sawyery of the World, this is called the "rabbithole effect": a place of
peculiar dwimmery, often a cave or some other subterranean passage, or
even a dusty and little travelled door-lined hall in some very old house,
serves as the conduit not only into the realms of Underworld, but also into
magical realms outside of normally conceived reality. And therefore, one
supposes they must also be understood to be egresses from those same
alternate realities and ìnto the Middle World. If one were to go through such a
hole, one might wind up in a rather different place quite far from where
one expected to go.
> Two of the countries were talkative vountry and silent country. I just saw
> an episode of Evil Twins describing the twins know as the Silent Twins due
> to their selective mutism.
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/314349.The_Silent_Twins
> My question is could that apply to a race? If so, how would that work?
Why not? Given that the girls described were "antisocial" and entirely absorbed
in their own private existence, I would suspect that any such race
would die out and go extinct before it has a chance to thrive. If we posit a
race of people who regularly give birth to twins (or higher sets of multiples)
and a large enough number of boy-girl twin sets are born, then it might be
possible that such twins could sustain such a population. Am not sure what
sort of culture these people would have -- with no one interacting with anyone
else, there would be no material culture to speak of, no education, no
communal language or story telling, really nothing that we would understand as
culture. This race would be little more than pairs of half-wild animals.
It might make more sense to make this phenomenon more of a commonplace among an
otherwise ordinary race. For example, among the Daine, this
kind of intense inter-twin behavior is not at all unheard of. The magnitude of
the behavior described in the book is perhaps beyond the behavior of Daine
twins -- they will generally communicate with people and interact with the
outside world, but they almost always share their own inner world as well. They
often times share a secret language, rarely can they stand to be parted from
each other, almost never marry or engage in a serious relationship (or when
they do, it's with each other).
> In other words, could it be a natural phenomenon?
It apparently already is; but I haven't been able to convince myself that it
could be a wide-spread or pervasive one.
Padraic
Messages in this topic (3)
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1c. Re: TheSilent Race
Posted by: "Tony Harris" t...@alurhsa.org
Date: Wed Aug 7, 2013 6:30 am ((PDT))
On 2013-08-07 09:01, Padraic Brown wrote:
>
>> My question is could that apply to a race? If so, how would that work?
> Why not? Given that the girls described were "antisocial" and entirely
> absorbed in their own private existence, I would suspect that any such race
> would die out and go extinct before it has a chance to thrive. If we posit a
> race of people who regularly give birth to twins (or higher sets of multiples)
> and a large enough number of boy-girl twin sets are born, then it might be
> possible that such twins could sustain such a population. Am not sure what
> sort of culture these people would have -- with no one interacting with
> anyone else, there would be no material culture to speak of, no education, no
> communal language or story telling, really nothing that we would understand
> as culture. This race would be little more than pairs of half-wild animals.
>
> It might make more sense to make this phenomenon more of a commonplace among
> an otherwise ordinary race. For example, among the Daine, this
> kind of intense inter-twin behavior is not at all unheard of. The magnitude
> of the behavior described in the book is perhaps beyond the behavior of Daine
> twins -- they will generally communicate with people and interact with the
> outside world, but they almost always share their own inner world as well.
> They
> often times share a secret language, rarely can they stand to be parted from
> each other, almost never marry or engage in a serious relationship (or when
> they do, it's with each other).
>
Just to add another possible path to this, it would also work if the
race (species) in question were either asexual or hermaphrodite, such
that individuals had very little interaction with one another beyond
simple territorial dispute resolution. Isaac Asimov touches this in, I
believe, "Foundation and Earth" (or at least one of the Foundation
novels that came well after the original trilogy), where he has one
character who is from a world of hermaphrodites where everyone lives in
virtual isolation, served by robots. That race, which is human, did
not, of course, evolve that way, but rather evolved into that state.
Whether a race could start off that way, asexual/hermaphrodite and
introverted/isolationist to the point of not really interacting with
each other, and still develop anything resembling a society or
civilization, i.e. not be just living in the wild, in an animal-like
state, and operating on pure instinct without conscious thought as we
know/envision it, would in my mind still be a question. But one well
worth exploring in a conworld or novel.
As an aside on this, I replied first and realized (after hitting send)
that the Reply-To was set to be directly to Patrick, not to the whole
list. That seems odd to me, as the norm has been that you just hit
Reply and it goes to the list, not the sender. But that seems only to
apply to Patrick's message, as others still work as expected. Interesting.
Messages in this topic (3)
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