(urth) Science catches up to the New Sun

David Stockhoff dstockhoff at verizon.net
Sun Dec 14 19:10:06 PST 2008


Agree to all that. I think one way to summarize it is to say that the 
cosmological scheme of TbotNS is a literary device, like time travel 
itself. It's an idea, not a working model.

As such, it arbitrarily closes off certain possibilities and elides 
others. This is similar to the standard problem already pointed out with 
branching-timeline models: unless some Overseer is judging the value of 
all lines, all lines must exist, even if the likely ones vastly 
outnumber the unlikely. So one must simply ignore what doesn't fit.
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Sun, 14 Dec 2008 14:40:44 -0600
> From: Jeff Wilson <jwilson at io.com>
> Subject: Re: (urth) Science catches up to the New Sun
> To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
> Message-ID: <49456F4C.1000100 at io.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
> David Stockhoff wrote:
>   
>> Are all the universes either human universes or Hiero universes, and
>> each species are as gods to the other? If so, which was the first?
>> And what about all the other sentient species?
>>     
>
> Alien sapients seem deliberately off the table in the BOTNS, but as for 
> your other question, I htink it's been fairly settled that the Hieros 
> are the humans of a previous incarnation of the universe, so it's a 
> cycle involving successive forms of the same "species". This may be a 
> late add on, and not airtight, but it seems necessary to prevent Noah's 
> God from being a liar.
>
>   
>> Second, the Hierodules who supposedly live their lives moving
>> backward through time. I can grasp going on a time-travel mission in
>> which one pops in and out of time, but I do not understand beings who
>> live time backwards, or how that fits into the model. Which is meant?
>>     
>
> I am pretty sure that Barbatus, Famulimus & Ossipago progress moment to 
> moment in the same direction as everyone else in their current plane of 
> existence as there is no reverse speaking, dropped objects returning to 
> their hands, etc. but it is there mission to help supervise Urthly 
> progress during Severian's life, so they they begin at his end and use 
> travel once or more likely on multiple ocasions to progressively earlier 
> periods, speanding months or years at each stop. With their short 
> lidespans, this is a life-long mission (maybe not for the mechanized 
> Ossipago) for them even if they skip the boring half of his years, so 
> they might well be said to live backwards.
>
>   
>> Clearly, not only do all universes exist, but all time exists. What
>> does this do to Apheta's agonistic model? Her race has already either
>> won or lost its struggle. If it ever once misses in its aim of
>> raising up Man or being raised up in turn, does it become always
>> already extinct? And if it doesn't, who cares whether they succeed or
>> not? Why is it SO IMPORTANT that their scheme succeed? (Humans don't
>> care if their descendants go extinct in a few centuries--why should
>> the Hieros care?)
>>     
>
> I think Yesod's time is not the same as Urth's, and most closely aligns 
> with narrative time, falling somewehre between the Urthly skein of 
> timelines (mostly parallel but some seriously tangled) and the eternal, 
> changeless nature of the Catholic God. Most points on Urthly timelines 
> are visible by the powers in Yesod, but they can be changed by earlier 
> Yesodi influence so that "later" in Yesod's view Urthly affairs seem to 
> have proceeded differently in numerous eras.
>
>   



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