(urth) Hethor

[Duncan Truter]

agreed. the 'towers' were individual spaceships, from what I gathered.

On 5/5/06, Rex Racer <rex.racerx at gmail.com> wrote:
> I remember the Citadel being not a ship, but a spaceport with any number of
> the towers being "landers" as Silk calls (though the nomenclature and
> descriptions in the BotNS makes it pretty clear that the towers are old
> spaceships repurposed when the age of space flight (at least the part coming
> from Urth) came to an end- walls being added, stone structures and
> extensions slowly accreting through time.
>
>  I can claim no authoritative positon without the books at hand to
> reference, but I remember nothing to indicate the whole Citadel being a
> massive ship on par with the Quasar, rather than Nessus old space port.
>
>
> On 5/5/06, Macronaut <macronaut at yahoo.com > wrote:
> > I remember that the towers of the citadel are revealed
> > to be ships waiting to leave Urth in the last days of
> > Typhon.  But I don't recall anything suggesting that
> > the citadel as a whole was itself one big ship.  It's
> > an interesting idea -- is there textual support for
> > that? Or am I misinterpreting?
> >
> > Macronaut
> >
> > --- b sharp <bsharporflat at hotmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > I first saw the idea of Mourning Glory's mention of
> > > Purn as Hethor and
> > > Gunnie as his paracoita in Robert Borski's Solar
> > > Labyrinth.  Perhaps Mantis
> > > is in agreement on this idea.  I believe the logic
> > > is that Hethor is a shape
> > > shifter, taking the form of a half-bird, half-deer
> > > creature called a
> > > peryton.  Severian sees the peryton/Hethor over him
> > > during his escape into
> > > the mountains but eventually decides it is a
> > > constellation.
> > >
> > > Hethor is presumed to be in this form when Agia,
> > > riding a winged creature
> > > with claws, later snatches Severian from the evzone
> > > soldiers.  So peryton
> > > becomes Purn (shades of Dragonriders of Pern?). Both
> > > in Severian's earlier
> > > dream and during the snatching the winged creature
> > > is noted to have a mitre
> > > of bone on its head, suggesting the dinosaur-era
> > > pterodon.  But it also is
> > > supposed to have the head of a hag which sends
> > > things into a mythological
> > > slant I won't pursue here.
> > >
> > > Like Roy, I don't find the Purn-Hethor connection
> > > satifying.  It is all
> > > based on the name Purn and that he is a sailor.
> > > There is no physical
> > > resemblance nor psychological resemblance to
> > > twisted, mysterious Hethor.  To
> > > me Purn seems to represent the simple, average Urth
> > > resident who would
> > > instinctively fight to save Urth without much care
> > > or thought to deeper
> > > issues or personal demons.  Also, Gunnie has dark
> > > eyes, not violet, and is a
> > > very big, strong, aggressive woman.  Hardly a good
> > > candidate for a poppet
> > > doll with small hands who lays in a lemonwood box
> > > all day waiting to spend
> > > the night with Hethor.   (But perhaps a childish
> > > version of Thecla is...)
> > >
> > > However, Hethor as a shape shifter is satisfying to
> > > me for a few reasons.
> > > Even Severian wonders how Hethor is able to
> > > transport his larger pets
> > > around.  There are some interesting early (SotT)
> > > statements Hethor makes to
> > > identify himself.  Stammering, he says something
> > > like  "I the old captain,
> > > the old lieutenant, the old cook, feeding the dying
> > > pets." I take this to be
> > > a true description, though I can't tell whether
> > > Hethor is describing a
> > > series of promotions or demotions on the ship.  But
> > > I think he was, at some
> > > point, captain.
> > >
> > > In UotNS we find in Tzadkiel, another ship captain,
> > > an angelic,
> > > shapeshifting being (as is the angel in Melito's
> > > story).  I think this lends
> > > credence to the idea of captain Hethor also being a
> > > winged, shape shifting
> > > creature, perhaps the obverse of Tzadkiel...a fallen
> > > angel?
> > >
> > > Hethor also describes himself as serving on the
> > > Quasar, and on a ship with a
> > > hundreds masts and silver sails.   He also says he
> > > served as the captain of
> > > the "limping ship".  In the time of BotNS's writing
> > > I think quasars were
> > > theorized to be white fountains, the compliment to
> > > black holes.  So I think
> > > the Quasar is likely (what we later learn to be)
> > > Tzadkiel's ship because its
> > > primary literary purpose, in the first 4 books, was
> > > to carry the New Sun
> > > back to earth.
> > >
> > > So what was the limping ship Hethor was the captain
> > > of?  Some suggest it was
> > > the ship that crashed leaving the ancestors of the
> > > antechamber prisoners and
> > > that Hethor's real name is KimLeeSoong. This could
> > > be the case, but then he
> > > would be a normal human not a shapeshifter.
> > >
> > > There is another ship which looms very large in
> > > BotNS but seems so far to
> > > have avoided attempts at explanation through all
> > > these years.  This is The
> > > Citadel.  I take The Citadel to be a ship on a par
> > > with the Quasar due to
> > > its large size and irregular shape (contrast to the
> > > Hierodule's ship which
> > > is like a flying saucer).  I think the Citadel ship
> > > is an alternate version
> > > of the Quasar, with Hethor as its captain.  This
> > > ship was apparently poorly
> > > captained,  flew too close to Urth (to retrieve his
> > > stolen paracoita?) and
> > > got stuck.
> > >
> > > bsharp
> > >
> > >
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