(urth) House Absolute

Lane Haygood lhaygood at gmail.com
Mon Dec 1 12:52:06 PST 2008


The book very much fits within the "Dying Earth" subgenre (cf. Jack Vance)
and is more closely related to planetary romance/science fantasy than what
we think of as "science fiction."

So basically, magic is real, the laws of physics and science can be bent or
broken by the supernatural, and reality is malleable.

On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 2:48 PM, Son of Witz <sonofwitz at butcherbaker.org>wrote:

> 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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