(urth) House Absolute

Son of Witz sonofwitz at butcherbaker.org
Mon Dec 1 12:48:45 PST 2008


I agree with you Matthew. IT's not meant to be hard-sf.  (jeez, I'm a relative noob to the SF genre, do writers bother with that sort of thing) 

In the Lexion, Andre-Driussi points out that the Red Sun is not hard sf, but is from the covers of pulp sf books that inspired Wolfe.

~witz

>-----Original Message-----
>From: Matthew Groves [mailto:matthewalangroves at gmail.com]
>Sent: Monday, December 1, 2008 12:35 PM
>To: 'The Urth Mailing List'
>Subject: Re: (urth) House Absolute
>
>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.
>





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