(urth) Hard Science Fantasy?

[Lane Haygood]

Science fantasy was a genre long before Wolfe wrote "The Book of the  
New Sun."

A part of it is not knowing (following Clarke's famous dictum).   
That's the point of Jack Vance's "Dying Earth" books (to which the  
BOTNS is both a pastiche and a homage): in the far future world,  
wizards are those who command powers beyond normal ken, be they  
supernatural or technological.  The point is that the storyteller (in  
this case, Severian) doesn't know, and the readers aren't privileged  
with that information either. Bear in mind that any "internal  
consistency" of the story is only internally consistent if Severian  
relates it to us consistently.  We already know he claims to have a  
flawless memory, but the lousy sack of @#!!#$#$ is a liar at worst and  
simply not introspective enough to know when he's being deceived or  
deceiving himself.

Also, Wolfe is playing a kind of joke on us (that's what the  
afterwords are, where he "explains" a lot of the things we find  
perplexing).  Wolfe is telling us that he came into possession of  
Severian's manuscript(s), as a collector of things that have fallen  
backwards through time, and is translating them into English.  Because  
there is some conceptual gap and drift between our modern-day English  
(and the tropes and categories by which we understand things) and the  
tropes and categories to which Severian would frame things, we end up  
with things that somehow sort of resemble familiar concepts (solar  
sails) but not quite because we're seeing them not as Severian saw  
them (in actuality), but as Severian recalled them, translated them  
into words, and those words were then translated for a world so far in  
the past that certain words and concepts didn't even exist for what  
Severian was describing.

The end result is something chimerical:  at times, it appears familiar  
(oh, the Hieros are aliens come back to shepherd humanity among the  
stars!) but then is not (they may be beings from a higher universe,  
like angels!) but then is not again (they're not really angels but  
"filthy Hiero-wasp creatures that may or may not be somehow the  
descendants of the original starfaring humans).

The point is that we only know as much as Severian knows and is  
truthfully relating, but we are not in a privileged position to know  
where he is lying/being deceived and where he's not.  So we must take  
everything as it given and subject it to endless critique in some  
hopes of arriving at a hermeneutic understanding of just what in the  
holy hell is going on.

*breathe*

Lane
On Dec 1, 2008, at 7:54 PM, Craig Brewer wrote:

> So what counts as internal consistency in a world where, on the one  
> hand, what initially seems like a medieval castle turns out to be an  
> abandoned rocket ship (i.e., science trumps fantasy) but where, at  
> the same time, a dude ends up being able to inconsistently resurrect  
> both himself (?) and others (i.e., magic)? Isn't part of the point  
> of New Sun the not knowing whether science or magic is in control?  
> Wolfe specifically calls his chosen genre here "science fantasy" so  
> that he didn't have to hold to "hard science" or outright anything  
> goes magic. (I wish I could easily locate the interview where he  
> says this.) He also has written stories he's specifically labeled  
> "hard sf" and others that he's specifically called fantasy.
>
> My real point here is that part of what initially attracted me to  
> New Sun was the realization that the fantasy bits turned out to be  
> "sf" at times and that the "science fiction" tropes (the alien  
> Hieros, etc.) ended up having a magical, or at least metaphysical,  
> edge.
>
> (So all the real space sails talk is really cool. But is someone  
> also going to show me a real world technological equivalent of every  
> wonder under Urth and its sky? Or, a more pointed question is  
> whether even the assumption that one could do this misunderstands  
> the kind of imaginative world Wolfe created here.)
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: Matthew malthouse <calmeilles at gmail.com>
> To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
> Sent: Monday, December 1, 2008 5:31:30 PM
> Subject: Re: (urth) House Absolute
>
> Son of Witz wrote:
>
>> Yo, but we're talking about a book where the space ships have masts  
>> and sails.
>> It need not conform to science.
>
> But there should be internal consistency or a reason for the lack  
> thereof.
>
> Matthew
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