(urth) House Absolute

Matthew Groves matthewalangroves at gmail.com
Mon Dec 1 12:35:55 PST 2008


Again, this is the mistake of reading Wolfe as hard-sf.  Wolfe's future
doesn't have to be consistent with scientific theories of geology or plate
tectonics.  When he wants to connect his world to images of the present or
past, he does so with recognizable architecture; when he wants to show the
great age of Urth, he shows us the effects of erosion and sedimentation and
subduction kneading the ruins our world into unrecognizability or oblivion.
Nessus is Buenos Aires.  Nessus is Byzantium.  Incan ruins are still
standing, but the technology of the fare future is found as if fossilized.
That's the logic of Urth.  Wolfe's Urth is a rhizome of associations and
allusions to thousands of years of history and literature.  It's consistency
lies in the coherent structure of that rhizome, not in scientific
plausibility.

Therefore, if the elapsed time between our present and Severians is a
pertinent detail, then the clues to it will be found among the nodes of that
rhizome.  The Lexicon Urthus 2nd ed. has some interesting things to say
about this under "History of Urth."  (BTW, can someone tell me what the
abbreviations P.S. and S.R. mean in this book?)

On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 2:00 PM, Jeff Wilson <jwilson at io.com> wrote:

> The Stone Town would not have survived millions of years after the time of
> the Incas in recognizeable form. Plus, in the afterword of _Shadow_, "G.W."
> the translator of Severian's ms flatly states that he has photographed
> multiple buildings that remain standing in Severian's time, again implying
> that the separation is on a scale of dozens of millenia at most.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20081201/133557fd/attachment-0004.htm>


More information about the Urth mailing list