(urth) The argument for Intractability

Mon Dec 22 14:39:22 PST 2008

The time travel question that you guys have been hashing out seems to me important to figure out when trying to interpret the books. And I think the question of Sev's "will" is actually important. Are we getting a story of a bad guy trying to become good? (Free will) Or are we getting a story of a guy learning that his personal will is better left to higher powers? (Omniscient, omnipotent God/gods/powers/etc.)

I'm personally with Jordon on this. The "time is like an ocean" idea allows you take both of the above ideas at once and have them overlap. You have the linearity of Sev's experience, but you also have the meta-temporal perspective in which the Hierodules can manipulate things (for the Increate?).

There's still the bigger question here for me of whether this is all a holy process or just a sham of a holy process. I'm reminded of one of the story's in the Pelerines' tent (from the soldier whose name escapes me) about the proud cock. The angel comes down and says he's going to punish the cock for being too proud. But it turns out that he's wrong, and the story ends with the angel admitting that, although he's closer to the Increate than the cock, he's still infinitely distant and can only guess at His will.

If the Hierodules are like the angel, how "holy" are their designs in the end?

________________________________
From: Jordon Flato <jordonflato at gmail.com>
To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
Sent: Monday, December 22, 2008 1:16:44 PM
Subject: Re: (urth) The argument for Intractability

Yeah, I think we will forever bang up against a wall if we are looking at this linearly, with certain players crawling up the string, and other players moving up and down the string to make it the string they want or need.

When Malrubius tells Severian Time is like an ocean, not like a river, there is a lot being said.  Free will is not moot in a intractable scenario.  The development of Sev's 'soul' for lack of a better word is absolutely needed, and is only possible because of the events of the book of the new sun, which, in part, he helped created based on his future as conciliator.  The refinement of his torturers soul is not a by-product of the process, it's an intimate part of it.  I dunno.  I think it's a trap to think lineraly.  And I can't see any textual evidence for some sort of time traveling Catherine sent back to give birth to Severian with an engineered embryo.  Although the part in Urth with the woman is an interesting paradox.

On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 10:50 AM, Son of Witz <sonofwitz at butcherbaker.org> wrote:

I don't think it completely eradicates free will.
It's just that it's not linear. It's all happened already.
inhabitants of the timeline just experience it moment by moment.
I don't think "the exact genetic combination" is important. Severian's consciousness is what matters, not his body's cells. The book makes that point again and again.

This is the territory where it becomes useful to realize that at a point it stops being a SCIENCE fiction book and is truly a Metaphysical Fictional Metaphor.
This is why that Paradox is intractable. it's almost a metaphysical prequalifier to be a paradox.

~witz

On Dec 22, 2008, at 10:43 AM, Dave Tallman wrote:

I don't believe Wolfe does intractable time loops, whether in "Free Live Free" or in "The Book of the New Sun." (I don't think "Pirate Freedom" is intractable either, though I haven't worked that one out as well).

Intractable time loops imply no free will -- everything happens as it does because that's the way it has always happened. Chains of events that are built up from multiple iterations, carrying back knowledge from future to past, can be done with free will intact. In "The Book of the New Sun" we have an agency that can keep things on track -- the Hierogrammates and Hierodules are time-traveling through history and fixing things. They can create place-holders like a Conciliator-like religion, the autarchy, and the Guild, if they deem them necessary as preconditions for the emergence of the New Sun. Once a good candidate appears, they can fix up his life as much as desired and splice him back into history to replace their earlier bootstraps.

The trickiest thing is his birth. Even if the Hierodules ensured the meeting of Ouen and Catherine under similar conditions, the odds are millions to one that the exact genetic combination will be re-created. Thus it seems likely that Catherine was sent back in time already pregnant with a cloned embryo of Sev1. (I believe Catherine is the woman we see under guard in UotNS on the day of the deluge).

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