(urth) Typhon & Whorl
thalassocrat at nym.hush.com
thalassocrat at nym.hush.com
Thu Dec 20 04:28:07 PST 2007
I just find it really difficult to match up the NS and LS/SS
scenarios.
If you just took LS/SS by itself, you'd have something like this:
Typhon was a guy who quickly rose to take over the *Earth*. No hint
AFAIK in LS/SS of anything like an existing instellar empire, with
Typhon trapped on Urth through bad luck & force of circumstances.
The Duko says: "... when there was a war with one ***country***
stronger than the other, he was generally for the weak one ..."
He had two heads, for some unexplained reason, and a dysfunctional
family.
The Whorl was very likely the first & only interstellar
colonization project. It obviously took a long time and large
resources to build. There is no hint of FTL capability. A
generation ship was seemingly the only way to do it, and any
reasonable size estimates I think lead to the conclusion that
originally it must have been Ceres, the biggest asteroid in the
solar system (pace those who don't think it worthwhile to look at
dimensions etc).
Typhon was close enough to us in time for Latin & French to be
known languages; for people to have names like "Warren"; for
familiar ethnic groups to still exist; for our religious writings
to still be available.
Abaia etc are in the oceans of Urth during Typhon's reign, and
given that his family knows about them, presumably he does too
(whereas in NS their presence seems to be a new thing for the
"resurrected" Typhon).
If it wasn't for the tie in to Sev and Nessus I'd think that Wolfe
was just recycling some images and narrative themes from NS to
LS/SS; or that maybe Pas was actually "Typhon I" (as he is referred
to by one of the councillors of Viron), versus Sev's "Typhon LXXIV"
or whatever.
As it is, I have to think that Wolfe didn't care very much about
making the two series consistent. But if he didn't, then why the
tie in at all? So maybe he had something else in mind which I can't
figure out.
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