Chapter 11 Part 2 - Gene Wolfe's Return to the Whorl

0:00That's believe it or not, I hold you in the highest regard. I don't believe that. It's true, especially your tenacity because I bowed out after three seasons of Stranger thing, but you, you toughed it out and you watched that finale. Did you go to the AMC? Did you watch it in the movie? Absolutely not. Why would I do that to myself? Well, for one reason, you would lose all my respect and just did. A true fan would have been in the movie. No, no, no, but I did watch all of Stranger Things and I have seen the finale at this point, which is not really that surprising. This is going to air sometime in March, so most people who wanted to see Stranger Things conclude have had that

1:00opportunity at this point. But a lot of people did it right on New Year's Eve, right? Like they shot gunned the back half of the season, which was like eight hours long or something like that. Something like that. They released four episodes on the week of Thanksgiving, and then they released three more episodes the week of Christmas and the finale on New Year's. Gotcha, gotcha. So it was just the last episode. Yeah, it was just the last, but it was a two-hour movie and each episode prior to that had been one to one and a half hours, I believe. I want to talk about Stranger Things, but I actually don't want to talk about the content of Stranger Things at all. That's all I'm here for. Season five ended the way you would expect season five of Stranger Things to end, which is in a morass that was slightly confusing and there were some good parts and there were some bad parts. And it really looked like a TV show that had been gestating for ten years. Right. Eleven say, let go my ego. She did not, but she did say it's psychic-ing time. That's pretty good. No, so I don't want to talk about the content of the way

2:05the show ended. I'm sure there are plenty of people doing think pieces on that. And I don't want to come off as a super fan of the show defending it as like this was excellent cinema to be watching. It's probably one of the greatest things that our TV shows have come up with in the past ten years because I don't think that it fits in that category. But it is something that is fascinating to me, which is that it hits a populist very well-received overall big impact series in a way that not many other things have been for the past ten years. Okay, go on. Right. Stranger things is the closest thing Netflix has to something like a Marvel movie series, right. And obviously it is not the same scale as any sort of Marvel enterprise that Disney wants to undergo. But it still has that kind of resonance in the popular consciousness where people are talking about the fact that stranger things season five existed months before released. People were

3:06making jokes about how old the kids were for months before it actually released. People were complaining about it the day that the episodes dropped and people continue to complain about it even after saying, my God, what have we done with our society, right. But what's really happened here is interesting. This was one of the first big prestige TV hits to come out of the streaming era. And I think that's something that we forget now because we've had so many eras of streaming only hits that have happened. Right. This is a unique piece in comparison to a lot of other streaming hits because it came out before Netflix fully understood what a streaming hit would look like. And also how to corral and manage their self-created properties, right. Or the things that they licensed themselves in order to put out into the world. And because of that, it exists in this weird world where it is very much like other Netflix created things in many ways it started

4:09a mold. But it also has the vestiges of some experiments they thought about before they understood what these products would be. When you think about direct to streaming things that exist now, right. There's a couple things that have come out in the past couple of years. One is regular releases of episodes rather than dropping the whole thing in one chunk. Maybe they'll do two or three at a time, but they will try to do weekly releases because they found that developing a rhythm and having people have an appointment to watch that television is better for the longevity of the product as opposed to just slapping eight episodes down. Right. We also get things like prestige direct to streaming TV moving into shorter batches where they only issue one to two seasons of them. Stranger things managed to make itself a super hit and managed to get a deal out of Netflix before Netflix really understood that they could string people a long one season at a time. And so they knew they were going to have five seasons from about season two. Yeah. Yeah.

5:14I think that that's really interesting because it gave the Duffer Brothers and their writers room and everybody else a little bit more creative leeway to get all the way to the end of the series, whereas so many online series have made one season and maybe two and then just never been heard from again because the streaming service says up the numbers aren't there. We're not going to do it anymore. Right. We're not going to we're not going to invest the money into this. You know, there's a business decision being made somewhere where the money it would take to prolong this show for another season despite whatever accolades or quality or buzz there might be about it. Like the numbers just don't work out, right? So it's like, if you sent our world, you were too good. You weren't populist enough in order for us to do the Stranger's thing model. Right. And Stranger Things is, despite the fact that it is a big super hit and has wide popular appeal, still very much a niche product in the sense that it is very marketed towards nerds

6:16and geeks. It is marketed towards audiences that want 80s nostalgia and it is marketed towards people who want to have some level of danger horror that they can watch without being concerned that they're going to be the actual consequences of a Stephen King movie on the screen. But season four and five got pretty gruesome, right? Like in terms of violence. Yes, I think that there are some elements of that. But in terms of main recurring cast from season to season throughout the series, there was this idea of the kids on bikes aesthetic that you would link to Steven Spielberg move. Yeah, where an entertainment. Yeah, where no matter what the kids got into trouble with, they would be able to get out of it. And there might be some level of consequence to it, but it would not be so severe that you would have to worry about them being in deep, deep danger. Sure. Right. Yeah. And season five certainly traffics in that same area as well. They're trying to blend those two things, right? The Steven Spielberg Amblin Entertainment ET feel on the one

7:16side and the Stephen King it or carry on the other that push together into again, this like blended fake thing that never really existed back in the 80s. But something that people now could be nostalgic for both of those things. Yeah, for sure, for sure. So again, without spoiling anything that happens in stranger things season five, I do want to talk about the structure of the show and what develop and how all of these things warped to create what we ended up with as a product. Okay. Okay. I certainly think there's something going on in the show similar to what happened with Harry Potter. Harry Potter for those of us who are old enough to remember when the books were releasing, right? The first three books were very clearly these kids are having some adventures in a wizard school. And there's this evil bad guy named Voldemort. There's a connection there, but that connection's not too deep. What's important is that they're going on wacky adventures. Then the series blew up sometime between book two and book three and JK Rowling realized, oh, I've got something on my

8:18hands here. And suddenly Goblet of Fire got to be about two and a half times the size of any of the other books and lore got dumped and characters got developed and worlds got built that just weren't there in the first three books. And that's not a problem so much besides the obvious bloat, but it's also that now you have three books of structure that aren't necessarily the right structure for what is now being produced. And this is not even something I would fault the author for in this particular case. It's Scholastic's fault, Matt. Well, okay, if we have to have a bad guy, what it really is is the surprise of people actually like this, I can do more, I have more freedom and flexibility. And I hadn't planned for freedom and flexibility when I started this project. If you compare that to something like Lemony Snicket's books, the series of unfortunate events, which are very popular books as well, but not nearly on the level of something like a Harry Potter,

9:21those are very intentionally written to structure and the first book and the last book are about the same length and they all go through the story in about the same way. I don't want to say that Daniel Handler had figured out everywhere he wanted to be at the end of the series by the time he started the beginning of the book, but what he did do is make a decision throughout his writing process of I'm going to keep the structure and I'm going to keep the ideas of this book the same. And when I deviate, it's going to be gradual and slow. Yeah, I do think he had an idea of where he wanted to go. There's suddenly set up in the first book that doesn't pay off until the last one, but you're not wrong. In a lot of ways, series of unfortunate events is much more sophisticated than Harry Potter, but in other ways, it is much, much less sophisticated because each of those books is telling essentially the exact same story all over again. And that structure and the predictability of that structure is very much what Handler wanted to put in the series when he wrote it, right? Whereas I think you can look at rolling in what happened with Harry Potter and say,

10:25ah, she realized she wanted to write a different series after she got popular. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think Stranger Things had exactly the same problem that they wrote a season one that was compelling and they had an idea board because this is a TV show and you say, where could we go after this? But honestly, we're not going to worry about that. We need to get eight episodes cranked out now and we need to do the best frickin job we can with them because we won't get eight more episodes unless we do eight really good ones here. So they use as many of their contained good ideas and the most developed things they have all in season one. They get renewed for a second season and they say, awesome, let's try to do the same thing again. And it was not quite as successful as the first season. Generally, you hear the reviews of season two say it lost some of the magic it had. This is the sophomore slump, right? Well, it has its defenders though, like anything will. There are some people that say it's rather successful. You're not wrong. The general like consensus in the popular like imagination is that it was a pretty hefty step down. But it's also

11:29like a sophomore slump is not unexpected because you're expecting someone to strike lightning twice a row and that's actually relatively hard to do. It's really hard to when you're trying to replicate the the original success, right? Like in the same way using the same techniques in the same beats, right? In addition to this, while season two is getting built, the duffer brothers are inevitably in talks for how long can we make this thing go? How big is it actually going to be? Can we prove that there's something that has legs here? And that's where they're pitching to executives and trying to give the executives what they want to green light and say, yes, here is your pile of cash. We will give you five seasons, right? And they have some level of clout because they have fans and they have popular ideas and they have something that Netflix does not have anywhere else at this point in its catalog, which is something that you can make merchandise off of, have the cross product marketing rights, which we saw them lean into stranger things hard and fast. Yes, and it was like the first time that Netflix could really make money off a property the way any

12:32children's film can because it can have a happy meal tie, you know, whatever, right? We call that the upside down Lego set. Yes. Anyway, $300. Yeah, so we get season one, we get season two, which is a little bit of a slump, but they've also proven that this thing has legs and they get Netflix who is still relatively new at this prestige TV thing to agree, yeah, we'll do three more seasons up front, which is something that almost no TV show that they produce is able to get now. And that means they have the freedom to go in a rolling direction and say, okay, what do we want this story to really be now that we have the space and the freedom to tell it? Unfortunately, for them, they also have two seasons that they've already established, which is kind of the story they wanted to tell, but not exactly. And they also have to come up with more story because they used up all their good ideas in season one and some of their good ideas in season two. And so season three is sort of this weird morass of the two things. I actually think it's more successful

13:38than season two because it goes campy and it says, okay, we're going to lean into this stuff that made it fun as hard as we possibly can and not worry too much about the story because frankly, the story is a mess right now. Yeah, yeah, I agree with you. I think season three is a little better than two because it is fun. It's got the fun conceit of setting. It's got fun and compelling new characters, which are very well acted. And it's got that freshness in it a little bit that season two didn't have. However, the overall story for the season is like nonsense. Yeah, there are structural problems within everywhere and people kind of forgive that because they're like, okay, it's horror. We're going to let it be loose and just play with the terror idea. Or they say, you know, it doesn't matter because here I am looking at a mall. The way malls used to be in the 80s, not our modern malls, but like a real mall. Right. Now we get to season four and season five. And this is where they go. Wait a minute. We have a big thing. We can't just camp our way through two more seasons. We want to have legacy. We also want to think about how we tie this

14:41in and how we prove that this deserved to be where it was. Also, in the middle of this, while season three is filming, we have the pandemic, which delays everything screws up Hollywood probably wreaks havoc with every production schedule that's out there TV or film and certainly makes it harder to maintain the continuity of trying to keep their actors as young as possible while they film. I think there's also an element there where when they were cutting these deals and they knew they were looking at five seasons, they knew and by they, we might be speaking about the Duffer Brothers here or the larger writing staff or we might be talking about Netflix executives, the they that produced this TV show, right. But they realized that if you're going to blow up the thing to that grandiose level that gives you the excuse to do a big grandiose finale. And they were, they've been talking for half a decade, Matt's about how in the last season, all the episodes would be movie length or whatever. And they tempered that a little bit as they scaled back. But there was

15:44a visions of the grand finale for the show six, seven years ago where they envisioning movie theaters, I don't know, but certainly an event that people would be like setting their calendar by, right. And that means you have to build the lore, the buildup, the suspense, the gravitas to support the big finale. So then we get season four out of this, which is the full rolling effect, where the Duffer Brothers and the writers room says, okay, we need to set up the big bad and the story that's going to be our amazing cinematic conclusion in season five. Also, we've got to deal with all of the problems that we didn't deal with from season one through three. This is also the problem with lost where the dinosaur becomes a smoke monster or all of those other things. And that means that we have to come up with this mythos and talk about Vecna and take this loose D&D structure that we've put into the series before and make it the underpinning of everything that

16:47we're doing and try to work as many character beats into that as we can. And also making sure they hit all those beats and hallmarks that have now been established as a pattern in those earlier seasons, because by this point to be a season of Stranger Things, you have to hit ABCD and E. Now we get to season five, right, where four was largely successful in the sense that the fan base who was there didn't hate it and said, okay, I'm on board for whatever's going to happen next. Huge delays in Sue because they realize that they need more money than they think they do and it's going to be more complicated. And also their child stars are in some cases now adult stars that are getting movie roles or Broadway plays or whatever you have. And it gets harder and harder to get them all in the same place to film something at the same time. You also have the expectations there, which are sky high, not only from the public who wants to see these final episodes, but also from the executives who say, we're investing millions of dollars in making this happen.

17:51And you've got to prove to us that we're going to get those millions of dollars back. And that this wasn't a giant boondoggle that we made a mistake about five years ago and all regret. Yeah. Right. Yep. So that's why we get into this extended bit. They also realize by now that the drip release is going to be better for them than the drop everything at once because they've learned from user data how people actually behave. And that is a very big difference from where they were 10 years ago when they put stranger things out there and said, this is an unknown new property. We have no idea how many people are going to love this or hate this. We need to see what works. And it was part of many experiments that came out during that same period. It just happened to be the successful one, right? Yeah. So all of that is to say anyone who thought that season five was going to be anything different to them. What we actually saw at the end of it with Linda Hamilton playing a major antagonist role because a big name star would be helpful to drive audience

18:53members to it. But not necessarily have the greatest plot line is not a shocker, right? This is the result of a series of complex decisions and factors that happened all the way back in season one permuting off to season five and creating this behemoth that is still recognizable as stranger things and absolutely maintain some of the energy and excitement that we saw back in season one. But also blotes itself to the point where it is self-important because you've had 10 years to talk about these characters. And there has been nobody there with the discipline of Daniel Handler saying, I know what I want this story to be all the way through. I have committed to this and I'm going to stick to my formula because of that. The formula is just totally different at this point because it's evolved in the many iterations of what stranger things has been. And yet there are people saying, what is this slap? I hate it. I don't understand why it's here.

19:56It is here because it evolved that way over the course of a decade and you contributed to it by watching it for the first three to four seasons, right? Yeah. I understand why it's here, but I do hate this slump. Without commenting on the quality of the show or how successful you felt the plot was wrapped up or anything like on that level, do you think it met the expectations of everything you've just described considering its gestation and transformation over the decade? It's a good question because having watched every single episode of this and not feeling like my time was wasted, right? Am I sitting here saying this was a fantastic piece of cinema? Absolutely not. Am I sitting here thinking this was fun popcorn and I was having something I could talk to my wife with while I was watching it? Totally fit that bill. Also, you were like, thank God, thank God. There's an intro topic here. Thank God. That's definitely what I think every time I turn on the TV. So yes, that was there. But much like the kids in the show, right? My relationship grew up

21:00with this. My daughter was one year old. I barely had a podcast when Stranger Things Season 1 was released, right? Yeah. So it is something that I have been able to watch grow and evolve just like you and I have on the air for the past ten years. Right. Right. And I think that there's something magical about that even if it doesn't get perfect by the end of the line. I don't want to say that this is a travesty and that these last couple of seasons should never have been made because I don't think that that is true either. I just also find it fascinating that a lot of people are arguing I would love to see what season one was again when that is necessarily a nostalgic and inaccessible thing that they are hoping for. And they probably haven't actually watched season one in a very long time when they're saying that. So they're really going off their own edited mental image of that that it's difficult to understand that as a coherent social critique. Yeah, I think that's a sound argument. However, Matt, I got to say Stranger Things just sucks. It's disappointing from

22:06start to finish. And as much as you justify it, you can't get around that. Okay. I understand where you're coming from. And speaking of two people who are disgusted that nobody sent them an advanced copy of a Demogorgon popcorn bucket, welcome to Alzebo Soup where we literally become our favorite authors by devouring portions of their brains. I'm Matt. I'm Phil. And nobody here except me will ever be able to celebrate the smile of awe and wonder that just crossed across Phil's mouth. I'm furiously googling Stranger Things finale popcorn bucket. All we do have one, it is a Demogorgon face that opens up that blossoms like the flower. You got lucky, Matt. I didn't get lucky, Phil. I followed the growth of this licensing behemoth from season one and understood the zeatgeist. Well, that also, but of course, this is what the popcorn bucket is because it's the most obvious thing in Stranger Things always does the most obvious thing. We are into the second half of the most obvious chapter of Return to the World,

23:0911 My Trial. And it is 11. I made this happen on chapter 11, Phil. Before we get talking about that, though, I want to give a big shout out to all of our patrons who have been supporting and helping the podcast for years in some cases. When I say we've been doing this for around 10 years, and we really are that close, we're about six months out from our 10th anniversary at this point. It's amazing to me that Phil has wanted to sit in this room for me for this long and this room is a different room than the room we started at because we weren't even in the same house when we started this podcast, right? So many changes have happened in our lives and it really does mean a lot that we have had the consistency of patrons here to support us and actually say, you guys are important to me. What you're doing has value and it's a thing that we can hear whenever we need to. It's become a part of our lives. It always stuns me when we do our regular surveys

24:09to get patron input. How many people say, this is an important part of my weekly experience. That is so cool. So thank you everyone for supporting the show as always. It's an honor. And also apologies to the patrons who just canceled their subscription because I said stranger things was bad. I understand where you're coming from. It's fine. No apologies, though, to the people who are mad that we did an intro topic on stranger things because you could adjust the fast forward button. We got a time stamp. Okay, here we are coming in the back half chapter 11, my trial already things have been popping off. First of all, the courtroom is packed not just with all the citizens of Dorp who have come to see the trial of horn the magician horn silk come again, a horn the leader of gown and the general of Blanco, right? And also all the armed guards who have been placed in the courtroom in case any shenanigans should occur. They were very prudent in their thinking meds. Yeah, lots of shenanigans occurred. First, we've got this star trial lawyer bursting onto the scene at the beginning of the trial saying, hang on,

25:13we're not ready to start till I get to the table, right? Then we have junior poltergeists, Mora and Fava trying their best to do something creepy that's gonna freak out the citizens of Dorp. Of course, all of that is for not because the neighbors decide to show up and that really gets things cooking. And none of this is to even comment on that babby chased around judge Hamer like a Scooby Doo cartoon. And at one point, bit at his bottom and ripped away the robe to expose his polka dot boxers. Yeah, it was a real pin up kind of moment for them. They should put that on a sunscreen bottle, a short sunscreen bottle. There's been so much action in this courtroom that you would be forgiven for forgetting that this is all being related after the fact. In Conto is now on a boat headed back to New Viren, captained by Viger, and he's taking hoof, hide, jolly, babby, and orab with him so that they can all have a perfectly sound home coming with nettle that will have no problems whatsoever. And that's why we know this is the last chapter of

26:16the book. So Viger is just revealed to Horn that he knows that jolly is in humo and they've come to this understanding between the two of them. And Horn has sent babby below decks regardless to protect jolly because this is still a dangerous situation. He writes, I felt like going below myself, I will not, not for a few more minutes at least. And indeed, we will find him returning to his depiction of the trial. He just has to get out a few of his thoughts on page first. But he says, I'm going to stay on the deck because I know that it is as cold there as here and dark with 100 vicious drafts in places of this bracing wind. Like the whirl and its brave, suffering people, I cling to my son as long as I can. That's certainly a powerful metaphor there, the clinging to the sun, just in the same way that the people up on the world clung to the long sun. But also, it does reach back to earth and the way that it clings to its dying sun and until the epitome of

27:19earth can be found and the white fountain can rejuvenate this planet. It's good that you bring up the red sun world here because inconto wants to talk about that a little too. He says, Viger was really interested in the neighbors and said that was the thing that impressed him most about the trial. But he wanted to avoid talking about the terrible place that was the ruins of Nessus that somehow inconto took everybody to. And he goes on to describe that journey as a bad dream or at least that is how Viger will classify it for himself in like a month's time and he starts to be less convinced of the reality of that truly mystical and supernatural occurrence. And he goes on to ponder like how many of the things that we do call bad dreams were actually bad experiences. And then he further says and what difference does it make because a dream is real in some sense. And this is certainly easy to say with confidence for someone who has literally gone to real places through the act of

28:22dreaming, right? But in another philosophical sense, he's not wrong. We experience our dreams as reality when we experience them. And they have just as much impact on us as real experience, even if we do tend to forget them over time. He also talks about dreams as a source of denialism when he says, you can dream that your wife is faithful to you. And as long as you do that, you're happy. You just don't want to be confronted with the reality. Remember this, my sons. So he's making this statement in here that has everything to do with dreams and realities being the same. And dreams also being a delusion, but that also means the state of reality is just a delusion. And there is an indifference there too, because we can disregard dreams no matter how much they might have actually impacted us. So all this is wrapped up in this statement. And then we get the joke on the end. Read carefully, hoof and hide. I know that you are peeking at this or read it someday. So this is the part you should pay attention to this part about wives and assuming

29:27things are happy, right? Immediately after that, he says the reality is that the wife we think is faithful may be faithful to us sometimes and not at others. We can't tell if he's directly inditing nettle in this moment or if there is something else going on. This could also be the silk part of inconto thinking back to high a synth and trying to forgive her for what he knows or transgressions that he didn't have to think about when they were married. And he ends the sentence with the phrase just like other women. And we might read that misogynistically to say he's making that assumption all women are unfaithful, right? But I think he goes past that. It's more like all humans are unfaithful. Our baseline as flawed creatures is to sometimes be loyal and sometimes not like we waver. From here, inconto takes the argument in a very interesting direction. He says this is the reason that we need gods because we have our dreams and reality doesn't necessarily match

30:32our dreams. And we also prefer to live in our dreams as opposed to reality. The gods see what is real or if they do not, we imagine they do. Surely the outsider must, if it is true that the rest worship him. How did the people with whom we walk in our dreams perceive our waking? The people who speak to us there and to whom we speak, we die to them. Do our corpses remain behind until the companions of our sleep bury them weeping? Last night, I dreamed of finding this pen case in fire. No doubt the dream was what set me writing again today. Now in reality as I understand it, I found it between the time I left my old Manteon and the time Matera's daughter called to me from a fifth floor window. Was it more real when I found it than when I dreamed it? How could it be when there was no difference between the two? Was it actually where my father's shop once stood that I found it? Or is that merely a part of the dream my waking mind has not yet rejected?

31:36It seems a little too pat to be true, yet memory assures me of it now. So we start with this general idea, right? That the gods exist because they have the ability to perceive the truth around the dreams that we weave for ourselves. That they are the observers of all reality and they have the responsibility for understanding what's actually there. There's certainly an implication here that suggests this is what makes a God. This is a form of omniscience, I suppose, but he's classifying it in that they see clearly. They perceive the illusion, the delusion, the dream, so the way we can't ever be sure about our own understanding of reality of ourselves, right? And he also creates this hierarchy of gods and says this is why pass in the nine worship the outsider because even they are limited gods in their goddom whereas the outsider does have the full perspective. But he also classifies it in this sense that even if the gods

32:36did not do this, we would still imagine this to them because this is the role that they serve in our like collective psyche. And it is through the imagination envisioning dream of a god met that we do find some reflection of truth of a clear sight or we might say like effective judgment. I don't know how strongly that argument holds up, but just keep this perspective in mind when we come back to this idea of reflection when we talk to vadsig in a little bit. There are also a couple of other things I want to draw out of this. The first is the idea that dreaming is one of the ways that humans themselves can become closest to gods because as you close your eyes and go to sleep and create this dream world in your head, you are the universal observer for that dream and you are creating a reality however temporary however fake it is when you quote wake up a few minutes later. So there is this idea of this is the closest that we ever get to experiencing

33:39what goddom might be like. Another way that that could happen, which is very apparent here in what we're holding is the idea of writing where someone can create an entire world whether or not they've experienced it themselves and populate that with characters that feel and look real and actions and events that seem as if they actually occur. Then in Conto goes to this specific moment where he talks about the pen case and about material marbles daughter calling to him from a fifth floor pay close attention because those are the exact two facts that were used in the previous chapter to construct everything that happened for horns journey throughout new virus. They use those two touch points and then built an entire fantasy around it and in that way they are constructing a reality and the question is who is to say what is real and what is not and what does the olivine on the page think when we close the book and walk away from it. There's other layers I

34:43perceive here too horn is using this example of dreaming of finding the pen case as a test against his earlier statement of like dreams and reality are essentially the same thing right and he says look at this example I dream defining the pen case and would it be any different than what actually happened no it could not be because that is what happened my memory tells me so the dream and his actions on the world line up one to one but he also notes that this is a little too pat right like this is too formalized not only does this pen case make such a good like metaphor that he can use in his construction of story but it was the thing that got him writing in the first place at the beginning of blue this memory recollection or do we call it a dream that's of finding the pen case and now this time when he's abandoned his narrative because the business of running Dorp has imposed so much on his time it is only when he has this dream of finding the pen case again

35:43that he is able to start up his narrative again right and isn't that just perfect like isn't that just the best way to craft the story the dream so even though he says I know my memory tells me this is what happened I I'm not sure or if it's not I'm not sure it's that dreams and reality are the same thing right at least he's having trouble distinguishing this yeah yeah yeah he says this is true this is what happened I found the pen case in my father shop I picked it up but it's not true because there there was never a person named horn the world doesn't exist he did not go there there was no pen case this is all a dream that gene wolf has crafted it is fake but would you call this book untruthful bets so layers right and contradictions and ironies and spirals right digging one layer back in where we acknowledge that the book is a fictional world and we're okay with that the other thing that's happening here is everything in this paragraph could be academic and philosophical except for the fact that in Conto again has been literally traveling through dreams and has seen people die in those dreams and has seen the consequences of those people

36:48dying in dreams when he wakes back up in his quote real world existence yeah yeah that's that's very fair and then having made this statement having put forth this philosophical argument he veers as sharply as he ever has we do not get a break in the text on the page there's no white space to indicate we are not only moving into a new scene but an entirely different time and setting and there's no transition words or any linkage of ideas he just jumps into it maybe he summoned up his courage took a deep breath thought of the dream of finding the pen case and then plowed forward he says how tall they were the neighbors robed in dignity again this comes out of the blue tall's voice was a brazen trumpet upon the vanished people upon those once lords of this world i call the good character of my client messiah horn let them defend everyone must have thought it was a mere trick of rhetoric and certainly there was no one in the court room or

37:50convinced of that then i i had spoken with them and explained my predicament and they had promised to help me if they could but i had imagined signs and wonders of the sword i hoped for and to some degree received from mora and fava not this uncanny spectacle of walking legends mounting the steps to the judges right and sitting one by one in the little witness chair to deliver the solemn testimony two things here right the first one i just want to point out that the neighbors are tall and robed in dignity they offer a parallel to judge hammer who is a petty judge of power and instead become these judges of time and circumstance and spirituality that nobody can counter in the space right they are a sheer force of magic they are something that the people don't understand and then we also get this description of them marching up one after another to

38:51sit on the trial chair remember every other time we've talked about the neighbors appearing it's been difficult to distinguish how many of them there are and also how they're experiencing time so this endless stream of them walking up to testify may simply be the same neighbor over and over again or it may be some combination of several neighbors doing it certainly we get the sense that there is a multitude of them all sitting in the same chair and that's uncanny to process and then also they are sitting in this chair reserved for the witness right the one that has been described as lower and in the realm of control of judge hammer right he presides over it but here they are described as sitting beside him in dignity and equality where now they are not so much taking the position of the witness though they are but also they are now co-judges of a sense from their very first appearance they have equal authority as hammer and part of the comedy of

39:53the scene is the way that he tries to hold on to authority in the presence of something that is truly magical truly mystical truly uncanny and just like who does he think he is right this courtroom could have had no way to prepare for an event like this in a sense it is openly defying the laws of sense and nature and yet it is not because it is something that can happen and people have to sit there in the disbelief of that moment this is about as crazy as I get right this is the most extreme mythical reality shattering historical event that has erupted in this book which is full of gods walking as men of men ascending to the position of God right of Severian being reborn in time over and over again of horn traveling to different planets through a dream right like these are books infused with fantasy and mystery and magic and yet this this feels like wow you got

40:56the book of silk out of what happened in that book this more than justifies the book of horn right it is a holy divine event maybe I'm I'm laying it on too strongly but I think it does operate on that level and it's even more impressive in that way considering this event of such magnificence and import is done in the service of horns character yeah and it is really important that the neighbor decides to conform to the rules of Hamer's court as he delivers his testimony the first thing that happens is Hamer says what has made you come to this place and the response is how could I not Hamer tries to assert his authority and says you're not allowed to be asking questions here and after clarification from Tal who I will admit is worth every card they paid for him because he's still continuing to act like a lawyer in this situation uh-huh the response from wind cloud is

41:56then I will ask no more questions until dork's law is altered though dork will lose by it we have come because honor compels us so here is the neighbor saying we'll do what you say and already I've taken away a benefit from you you could have learned so much more if you would have let us treat you as equal mm-hmm and thus begins the judgment of dork itself and Hamer as the neighbor sits in a witness chair delivering testimony in a second trial and here's the public of dork watching this happen and saying what's going on here where does the real authority lie a couple notes I want to grab here one this idea of honor is certainly important we've seen how horn puts the concept of honor in a special position in his interior cosmology or moral framework so the neighbor saying it is honor that is brought on here has some importance in that way also I want to say I hate

42:58the name wind cloud it's such a James Cameron avatar kind of name you'll note that it does not get an entry in our character list which I think was intentional on wolf's part this is something he legitimately wanted to save for the surprise of this moment yeah even so it feels very like stereotypical Native American right right and there's something there too where he's trying to evoke this idea of a Native American mysticism or of this vanished culture that got wiped from history right it just becomes such a cliche I think it was a cliche when this time was written but he's also like crafted blue to be a cliche with all these different nations that are so on the nose of our real world cultural equivalents right it's almost allegorical so we tolerate it but I wind cloud I mean come on a couple of things happen here first a painting crashes to the ground this is the conclusion of mora and fava's efforts hammer's freaked out and said did you do that

44:00the neighbor answers no you did of course the neighbor is speaking to all sorts of chains of callus and effect that position hammer as the reason why the picture fell right but I also like it to that mora and fava started like shaking the picture and then tall calls the neighbors and the neighbors come in and mora and fava are like well I guess we keep doing what we're doing but uh it's really necessary at this point right but regardless there's still the spooky nature the mystical nature the uncanny nature even paintings are flying off the wall meds uh-huh this leads tall to say to hammer listen I think we've got an unusual situation on our hands here it might be best if we stick to me questioning the neighbor rather than you interceding or we might get to territory we don't want to get to very quickly and hammer has to reluctantly agree okay that's the best thing we can do here tall begins by establishing the credentials of this witness by saying you know my client horn correct how long have you known him and wind song answers since I gave him

45:05my cup when he lived in my house this harkens back all the way to on blues waters chapter 11 when a cup appears in a house that the rojan of gown visits and he has received it as a gift from the neighbors it is also calling back to in green's jungles in in cleatose house which had a neighbor wall in it or at least a portion of a neighbor's structure when cloud says the man who lived there most of the time wasn't scared of him the way other people were and he noticed that horn wasn't scared in the same way either yep so there's this confusion of time and space right the neighbors do not experience the flow of time in the same way we do in the sense that he says I first met horn in these two different places that took place a span apart and there is some other business that we will go through when tall interrogates them regarding what do you mean he lived in your house did you like was he a visitor was he a guest and the neighbor has to explain well like

46:05when sparrows nest on your even the spring like did you invite them into your house note but they live there they're like in habit hints right this is one of the relationships between neighbors and humans right in just a couple of sentences wind cloud takes this idea to dismiss humanity as like the cute little thing that you barely even notice that happens to live alongside you they're like the pigeons in our streets or the rabbits in our backyard tell also in his argument here goes to some lengths to establish the neighbor's credibility as judges of character by establishing really what they are you do consider self men correct they go on to explain we do call ourselves men but what we mean by not is not humans right we are of a different race but the way he frames his question is to say now my sire rector here has forbidden me to ask you anything not regarding the case at hand so I can't ask you all the things that the people in this audience want to know

47:06such as the true nature of the universe and the meaning of life in any other secrets that the neighbors could share right and he puts all that blame squarely on hammer but now after having established the neighbor's nature he goes on to ask many men however you have known my sire meant such as I am and my sire rector is again he's pulling hammer directly into this yes I was one of those who boarded your world when it neared our son in the world I made the acquaintance of many of your race and I have known others sense on both worlds we once called our own bill hang on just a second I have to go get the alzbo soup air horn for major revelations this is a big one this is huge right the neighbors visited the world yeah oh my gosh you remember how we were talking about we just need one the opany to pull off this rebellion well not only are we having the gods of this world literally show up right but they are also telling us we've been with you

48:09all along yeah and of course tall will bring this argument to a point when he says and my client here horn these are one of the people you have met and the neighbor says yes indeed and I have found him to be an honorable man devoted to your kind a compliment which speaks huge amount of volumes coming out of wind clouds mouth here if to our kind devoted he is to yours a foe he must be Messiah that do you deny I do you spoke of your breed you breed your own foes who are our foes as well those who destroy others for gain and rob them for power here wind cloud paused I shall never forget it and I doubt that anyone who is present will and turned his shadowed face very slowly toward hammer this is awesome right here's a god saying you all create your own demons isn't that

49:10right yeah and on one hand he is speaking about in humay right but in the other he explicitly says what your foes are they are the greedy and the selfish and those who abuse power and then he stares directly at the guy who is greedy and selfish and abusing power and that is how you start a rebellion he couldn't have gone any better for the people who wanted justified reasoning that the judges were corrupt you can tell bear up is just pumping his fist in the background here right he's like we got him yeah oh you could send the hundred soldiers home we won't need them we've got everyone else right for miles around this this one only destroy Hammer's life right like this will end his line like once you're identified by like the vanished people and the the judgmental gods is being the enemy of humankind like that's it right it's over but we are still in the context of the trial here so tall asks a couple more questions we get this analogy we

50:12already discussed about humanity being the birds that live on the edges of the neighbor's houses right and then wind cloud uses a lapse in the conversation to make an accusation he looks over at that and says you say he has harmed you yet I see you whole fat and free while another stands beside him with a sword to his everlasting credit not rose and tried to withdraw his accusation but Hammer would not permit it asking whether statements he had made were false and warning him that they would be prosecuted for lying under oath if he acknowledged that they were what's interesting here is the neighbor isn't doing anything magical right he's just straight forwardly stating the truth as he sees it but it snaps the entire case in two everybody knew that this was a corrupt ruse from the beginning and tall was going a certain length toward proving that in a rhetorical sense by having witnesses come up and talk about what the state of the caravan was when it encountered

51:18horn hide and jolly right however wind cloud is cut through all of that and simply said what you're saying happened didn't happen and this person is being punished for something that didn't occur both nat and hammer see the case collapsing under this logic and hammer decides to try and drag nat down with him in the final moments he says you can't back out of this now or you will be even more guilty than we are suggesting you are in this moment yeah it is a last dish desperate maneuver but it's also it's like he knows he can't win at this point and there's nothing he can do to save himself but he does do this pathetic last grasp at holding some level of authority right at this point he is no longer a judge he's just a man he's a man who's by been identified as a foe of humanity he denies nat this ability to revoke his statement to try to do what's right even if he's been like co-washed into it through the the truth revealing power

52:23of this divine alien who happens to be there he might just can't allow that to happen he has to hold on to whatever last authority he can and that authority is to say no nat you cannot act in your best self right you cannot do what's right you must follow through on this unjust accusation even though in doing so like hammer is doing himself that much more yeah it's an i'm dragging you to hell with me kind of action and it leads in conto to his final big conclusion of this passage it's at this point in the trial that in conto realizes the problem in dorp wasn't the judges it wasn't hammer it was the whole system and the fact that the system itself was corrupt in a way that it destroyed everyone that it touched yeah hammer benefited from the system and helped maintain the system but that doesn't make him immune from whatever poison the system like generates yeah he may as well have been holding the one ring right he's being tempted by the fact

53:25that there is this power available to him in the system and in conto says i don't think that i would be immune from this if i was in his position that means that presumably he either gives up power in dorp because he knows that that's a problem or has already taken steps to prevent that from being an issue for the next people who rise to power in that city well it certainly raises the question of like okay if systems do this systems of society systems of power systems of order that you need to have a civilization what is the solution right and that is the question we're left hanging on and this question is left unanswered at this point horn finishes his report of the trial right it's all wrapped up in a nice neat bow well everything that in that is important has happened has now happened and entire revolution just to start with a journey to the red sun world and what we all wanted to see the most babby's re emergence into the narrative

54:27after an entire novel of absence in the most comedic way possible because not only does he chase hammer around the room he chases hammer around the room right after he was dunked on by the neighbors yeah it's a real jabber jaws moment but no he leaves off his narrative to bring us back to the present on the boat we're just like vizier had a few moments before now vazig has come to talk to him the first thing vazig does is make sure she's wanted here but she doesn't in a bit of a roundabout way she says you're sitting up here writing all by yourself and everybody else you know is downstairs having a great time why aren't you coming to see us and in contours as well I'm trying to keep working on this writing she says oh so you want me to go away very well say dirty old vazig be gone and I'm off and he says no no you can sit down and talk with me I would never call you that and this is the direction this conversation will take she teases him a little bit she provokes him in a way that she plays off his light and airy but really it's revealing in anxiety

55:31and she's testing him in a way she's going on about how soon they will be in virus and hide in her will be married but there's a problem in that she's not worthy enough of hide she's not pretty enough or that nettle will reject her and horn will have to counter all these arguments and even at 1.2 she says I'm poor I don't have a dowry it would be a mistake for hide to marry me and horn like pulls out like six cards out of his pocket and drops him in her lap and he's like there's more of that if you want it like I'm the king of dork now like yeah this is your dowry right so this is all surface level still though even though vazig may have some legitimate concern about some of these the real thing she is after is in contours blessing she says yes all of these things matter to me but I don't know if you like me or not if you think that I am worthy of marrying your son yeah and it is it's a it's a self esteem issue right that's going on here despite all the

56:33miraculous circumstances and despite what central involvement she had in the rebellion of dork and despite the fact that she will become an editor someday in her role as hide's wife she still does not feel herself worthy of being a part of this family that makes sense when horn so corn and canto is at the head of it right right also you've got hoofen hide who had brave rolls to play in the overthrow of dork hide has also had previous military experience in the battle of blanco and came into town within canto as an important figure so so there's a lot of mystique around both of those individuals but she is able to get to the place where she can outright ask it also your son you give and of course as we expect horn treats this so nonchalantly oh yes absolutely I give you my blessing heck I'll even perform the ceremony myself that is such a generous gift love that that's like way more important than any kind of gold cards he can

57:33give them but he just rattles it off yeah he also undercuts it immediately after it says but really you should have patera remore and do it he's much better at these things than I am I'm just a layman he's a much more appropriate person than I am there's nothing in the chrysmological writings that say a layman couldn't perform a wedding ceremony so I guess it's okay vatsig keeps going though and says a poor wife I will make and the response is before I returned here I met a young woman named all of e vatsig if she were here with us and in a sense she is for I have a part of her she would point out to you that you can give a man your love and bear children she could do neither and she would gladly trade every one of the centuries the gods may allow her for your next year this has a profound effect on vatsig she says you mean it really and it's what convinces her that incanto is blessing this marriage we'll return to this topic of vatsig self

58:38perception and self esteem but we go on a bit of a tangent here when she says someday I myself would like to go back to the world I hear you and the older generation and the cook talking about it all the time but it's a place I've never seen I would like to experience what it's like in grotesad that is dutch for great city so it is definitely following the trend of everybody calling their place the big city on the world and the little village down and she uses this to ask a question which must surely be one of any thousand that she wants to ask horn is it true that the vanished people went to the world I nodded to greet us it was you might put it so though they were sensible enough to find out a good deal about us and infect us within humay before they venture to greet even a few of us feel this is the second time this episode that I'm cursing the fact that I forgot our air horn it's wild right it's right there

59:45on the page this is how ketzel and any other in humay who made it to the world got there the neighbors brought them and we're going to see a little bit more conversation about this right now but boy is that a big revelation the neighbors who have been this helpful somewhat beneficent force the entire series who have befriended horn who have given him both blue and green on behalf of humanity when he acted in their stead to negotiate right here we find out they are also the origin of the biggest problem humanity has had on blue and green and it wasn't just a problem that happened when they got here it was also a problem that was taken to them before they began to enact the plan of posse yeah yeah we don't know how long it they actually existed in tandem with humanity upon the world but it was however long since the world arrived in the system with their psychic timey why me spacey ways the abilities meds they somehow knew the instant the the world was

1:00:47approaching right and so that's it is right when she asks were they an envoy did they come to greet us right but we have this problem where it's not just the neighbors it's in humine or up says this was a bad thing and that sig agrees it's very bad but horn says well as payment for two whole worlds two whole planets maybe that was an appropriate price that's not the only justification it is but I want to think about that a little bit horn will introduce the idea and we have to wonder to that like yes the neighbors brought the in humine but that doesn't mean they brought them on purpose or that they even had like the choice not to bring them right so this is not an official devil's bargain necessarily right yeah this is also not humanity voluntarily accepting the inhumie for the price of the two worlds they never knew about it it wasn't like someone walked up to mainframe and said hey we're gonna put these aliens in your spaceship is that okay yeah yeah so if the neighbors are viewing this as a transactional kind of thing where they are

1:01:51enacting the price of the presence of inhumai on the world for the cost of the planets themselves and indeed we see this transaction occurring this is what happened when horn went to shade low and met the neighbors and their fires right as the representative of blue and humanity at large like formally accepting the planets right maybe now we think of it like oh we've got it backwards then humai were not the price it's that the neighbors in no way could have prevented the inhumai from infecting humans and so therefore they were obligated to hand over the planets there's also all sorts of other weird ways we could interpret this right if the neighbors don't experience time in a linear fashion then the agreement that they made with horn could be simultaneous before or after when the inhumai were introduced to the world there's also an idea in here that they have seen the inhumai among humanity for so long that they knew it was an

1:02:51inevitability as soon as the humans arrived that the inhumai would have to be introduced it's not an excuse necessarily but it is an intertwining that is difficult to untwine because we don't know how they're experiencing it I could also see these two worlds being offered to humanity as an apology because the neighbors never intended for inhumai to become the scourge on humanity that they are yeah right but like you said there's actually one other practical reason the neighbors may have brought the inhumai to the world yeah and that's something we've talked about several times with analogies like a leech that's living on a frog and pretending to be a fish right it is the idea that the inhumai disguised themselves from their prey horn justifies the neighbors bringing the inhumai into contact with humanity because it allows them to more accurately judge the differences between their race and ours he explained this by saying you can't see yourself

1:03:54vadzik your eyes not have the physical capability of looking at you and seeing reality of yourself you can only judge it through an invention right a dream and and how close do dreams align with reality will certainly horn has been thinking on this point right but he makes the point that no creature is able to see themselves clearly and have true self perception what he goes on to say there is a path to true seeing and that is through love love sees well and it is well to see no matter how wonderful your eyes are they cannot look back upon themselves you see yourself when you see yourself at all in a silver glass i used to know a very clever person who would inspect it is appearance in the side of a silver teapot every morning hey it's a ketchup yeah but he too new still that his image was distorted you compare your own to that of other women you see in reality but if you were wiser you might compare their reflections to yours that is what the neighbors

1:04:56did knowing what their own inhumai were like they gave us ours so that they might compare the two i wish i knew what they concluded though i know what they did what he's saying here is we cannot perceive ourselves truly even a mirror is a silver glass it reflects wrongly with bias because we still perceive that reflection through our eyes right and our perception and our biases yeah and this is getting back to a couple of things that have been argued earlier in this chapter the first one is this idea of this is why we have gods right that they can objectively see where truth is in a way that we cannot as we dream as we have our distorted perception of what reality is it also manifested at the beginning of this very conversation where vazig is desperately searching for outside validation of what she hopes she is because she cannot perceive for herself that she is good enough or a person who is deserving of hide in marriage let alone the family that surrounds

1:05:58her yeah yeah now that's being drawn into the relationship between the neighbors the inhumi and humanity the inhumi we know our masters of disguise they blend themselves in to be what the neighbors perceive when they are hunting the neighbors and similarly they blend themselves into humanity when they are hunting humanity that means that the neighbors gain something when they see an inhumi reflect a human they gain that outside perspective that reality coming in of what does the inhumi need to do to behave the way a human expects a human to behave yeah they can't trust their perceptions of humans in itself because they also can't trust their perceptions of themselves right this is really interesting when you are talking about something that theoretically is a step higher up that ladder of divinity and has greater access to the truth and perception right but horn says there are avenues there are powers there are forces that allow us to access truth one of those

1:07:01is love when you are viewed through the eyes of love vazig you appear as you truly are right likewise the neighbors are an alien mind we're not saying they don't have the capacity to do love but they need something else right they need to see the difference between their inhumi and the humans in humi to understand humans what do they see 20 years plus however long they were on the world for of lies deception suffering prejudice violence all the worst aspects of humanity until silk comes along horn comes along and what do his inhumi look like they look like crate and july and ketzel not perfect by any means but human wavering right being that place where the falling angel meets the rising ape as terry pratchet so eloquently described our species this gives them at least the capability or motive to show up at the trial of horn right to defend the good human the one that produces the better in humi we might say the one that has shown that there is hope for humanity

1:08:05in that sense because if more people can understand their flaws and try to atone for their flaws behave in the way that inconto does then there is a chance that the inhumi will be forced to change their behavior as well look past their delusions and dreams of reality through the avenue of love love for each other love for the human in general right um i just want to talk real quickly too if the neighbors brought the inhumi onto the world and we know the inhumi were kind of like the personification of the devil in the religion there they were the bugs in the system they were the malicious narrative whales who muck things up in secret right perhaps then we do classify formally the neighbors as the angels in the system the also hidden entities but the benevolent ones right to some extent but because we have angels and devils devils are fallen angels like you described and that's very much the way inconto puts it the inhumi had effectively ruined their

1:09:09entire race that race being the neighbors i don't mean that all of them were dead but the civilization they had built had failed them when the shock came many had left these worlds already fleeing the inhumi but taking the inhumi with them this speaks to what he was talking about at the very end of the last passage where he said i realized in those final moments of the trial what the problem was here it wasn't hammer it wasn't nat it was the system that had evolved in dorp to corrupt everything that it touches the neighbors were in the same predicament they hadn't lost to their civilization but the civilization was corrupted beyond repair because the system itself could not work anymore and it suggests part of the project of the neighbors has been trying to define a new system a new reality that will make them immune to the inhumi by not allowing them to pray on each other which led to blues downfall and eventually greens that they are

1:10:15attempting to find a way to exist that does not harm other neighbors and they're wondering if that same possibility can arise in humanity we end these lofty thoughts with the statement from horn that we cannot see ourselves that we do need our mirrors and we cannot run from ourselves either suggesting that if we are to try to understand ourselves there is a responsibility that comes with that and indeed it is a responsibility that we cannot help but take on at this point he hears the clicking of babby's hooves and he sees that jolly has come to join them and he writes that the three of them now discussed things long into the night and that he will write of that later perhaps perhaps indeed once again in kanto has decided i'm not going to talk about the details of what happened i'm just going to gloss over that because you don't need it yeah but surely the conversation that follows this must have been so interesting especially considering the

1:11:17colloquy that has assembled here we have wizard wise man normal human in humo and disguise ascended animal right whatever discussion must have been the most impactful and important thing in horn is not going to give us it he teases us with this promise of perhaps but do we expect him to follow through that's where we'll leave our characters on their way to new viren and an uncertain but hopeful reunion thank you all very much for listening this has been alzabot soup i met and Phil where do you find your truest self have you heard of this make yourself a funco option that's a pretty good place to look for me it's when i go through the red wall into the upside down but specifically the upside down in season four not the upside down in season two alzabot soup is Philip Armstrong and Andrew Metsroth today's podcast featured part two of chapter 11 of return to the world by gene

1:12:18wolf originally published in 2001 by tom doherty associates audio editing by Andrew Metsroth graphic design by Philip Armstrong join our community for updates additional content and to help us find more brains to eat you can reach us at alzabot soup at gmail.com or join our patreon and talk to us on discord alzabot soup is a production of unreliable source media this podcast copyright 2026 Philip Armstrong and Andrew Metsroth thanks for dining with us we'll be back as soon as we can find some more hot sauce