(urth) Sev as the avatar of Abaia

[Dan'l Danehy-Oakes]

On 4/5/06, thalassocrat at nym.hush.com <thalassocrat at nym.hush.com> wrote:

... well, some interesting theory-spinning. I find some of it compelling,
some not.

But it prompts me to observe that there's been a load of auld shite
talked on this list lately about the idea that maybe Abaia & co. are
the good guys because they want to prevent the massive destruction
that Severian will cause.

Um, no.

If you haven't, lately, go have a butcher's at the Book of Revelations.
It's in the nearest Christian Bible. Go ahead, I'll wait here.

(Dum, dum, dee... biddle, biddle, bum... Heard any good jokes
lately? Ah, okay, they're back.)

You see my point? When the Messiah returns, it is not going to
be a happyland. Mass destruction. Megadeaths. Sea turned to
blood, fire, famine, flood, fear, foes, flatulence, the whole nine
meters. That's the way the renewal thing _works_ in Christianity.
There's a huge sacrificial price to be paid. Always. Tanstaafl.

Meanwhile, some nits and bits.

> I think the point is that an ediolon becomes a real human, given
> enough time.

Cue Pinocchio, Astro Boy, and Data... No, seriously, all we get
from this is that they develop real physical bodies, not necessarily
that those bodies are "real humans."


> The Increate is very much the Outsider in New Sun.

Oh yeah.

> Is it possible that we have here the real reason for SilkHorn and
> Sev meeting in Long Sun? Perhaps the meeting spawns a new,
> fundamentally changed iteration of the Sev time-line. Most people
> change after meeting SilkHorn; is it unlikely that Sev does also?

I think you've hit on something big here. We are explicitly shown
that by his manifestations, the Narrator can not only change a
person, but even change that person's _past_. It is entirely
possible that a "better" Severian than the one we know from
tBotNS will come from this encounter.

Contrariwise, it is also possible that this meeting was why
Severian became the person we know from tBotNS, why he
was able to be the Epitome that could bring the New Sun. I
see no explicit reason in the text to prefer either interpretation.

> Triskele is with Sev for much longer in Long Sun.

Is he? There's a mention in tBotNS that some time has passed
between when Sev adopts Triskele and when Triskele wanders
off, but we're not given a too-explicit idea of just how long.

(One of the ways in which Wolfe is the Anti-Tolkien: Tolkien
obsessed about maps and dates and such, rewriting whole
sections of tLotR to make the moon phases match up. Wolfe
seems to deliberately keep both chronology and geography
fairly vague.)

> But there is one glaring difference which I find very difficult to
> ignore: Merryn. When Sev meets her & the Cumaean in Stone Town,
> they don't recognize each other. But in Long Sun, Sev fetches
> Merryn to meet with Jahlee; after that, at any rate, they *must*
> know each other. Something has definitely changed.

Not clear. Granted Severian's trick memory, some years pass
between this and the Stone Town. How much has Merryn changed
in that time? And we've seen that, while Sev doesn't "forget" (except
when he does), things can slip his mind. For him not to recognize
someone he hasn't seen in several years (during which time both
have grown from preadolescence to adulthood) doesn't seem too
improbable.


> BTW, I find it easy to discount Sev's statement in Long Sun that he
> won't write about SilkHorn, because nobody would believe him. Such
> a jarringly inept piece of story-stitching, taken at face value;
> much easier to believe it's a sly, backhand Wolfean clue.

There's clearly _something_ going on there, since Sev at this time
would have no reason to believe that he would ever have cause to
write an autobiography. He expects to be an ordinary, pretty much
anonymous, member of his Order.

--Dan'l

--
I do not fear Satan half so much as I fear those who fear him.
                        -- St Teresa of Avila
http://www.livejournal.com/users/sturgeonslawyer