(urth) An Old mystery ...

John Watkins john.watkins04 at gmail.com
Fri Dec 5 06:55:01 PST 2008


On 12/5/08, David Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net> wrote:
>
> John---
>
> I agree, and I especially like your formulation of "the kind of Messiah humanity deserves." That's why such a Bad Example as Severian can be Epitome. What Urth deserves is the whole point.
>
> Question: How do we know evacuation was feasible? I suppose the starsailship could have been used an infinite number of times to evacuate millions at a time via time travel, but I don't recall it being mentioned.
>
>
I think Master Ash comments that most of humanity was evacuated before the
final freeze.



> Also, I have always simply assumed, in the absence of any direct evidence, that we are to regard all of humanity outside the Commonwealth as no longer really human---if the Ascians are any indication---and therefore no loss whatsoever, though they had an equal chance of surviving the Flood. But even if the Fountain is just a eugenics program, it's still complicated by a lack of information. Was the purpose to weed out those not worthy, and to decide whether the remainder were worthy?
>
>
>
This is I think the opposite of what Wolfe intends.  Yes, the Pelerine says
that the Ascians are animals, and the name "without shadows" is
tantilizingly like "without souls."

But the Story of Loyal to the Group of Seventeen seems to suggest that human
individuality has endured despite the repressive Ascian culture.

I think I remember Severian speculating that Loyal could communicate
anything he wished to.




> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 5
> Date: Thu, 4 Dec 2008 15:50:41 -0500
> From: "John Watkins" <john.watkins04 at gmail.com> <john.watkins04 at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: (urth) An Old mystery ...
> To: "The Urth Mailing List" <urth at lists.urth.net> <urth at lists.urth.net>
> Message-ID:
> 	<93d4039f0812041250v33a6d8b4x72bf8d2456b31269 at mail.gmail.com> <93d4039f0812041250v33a6d8b4x72bf8d2456b31269 at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> * * *
>
>
>  > So, for me, the destruction of Urth to create Ushas is not a monstrous act.> If there is no afterlife in New Sun, if the Increate isn't real (no matter> how conscious his servants are of his wishes), then the destruction of Ushas> is a brutal and monstrous one.  If the Increate is real, and there is some> sort of Life of the Soul in the books (of which textual evidence you've> asked for I would posit all of the discussion of the survival of Severian's> 'personality' through so many types of death, and the corridors of time> themsevles) then this act, the destruction of Urth, the 'hitting of the> reset button' is no longer monstrous, but another instance of the Increate> hitting the reset button like he did with Noah, or Sodom, or countless other> examples.
>
>
> My point isn't that there's no Life of the Soul in the Urth books--I
> think there pretty clearly is, at least of some sort.
>
> But that Life of the Soul seems wholly divorced from the flooding of
> Urth.  There is nothing literally redemptive about the destruction of
> Urth--it's just a big eugenics project, undertaken by artificial
> lifeforms who claim to be doing the will of God.  I think the
> comparison with Noah is much more apt than the comparison with the
> Second Coming, and maybe the reading that Severian is "the kind of
> Messiah humanity can produce," or maybe even "the kind of Messiah
> humanity deserves" is dead-on.
>
> I'll just reply to Son of Witz here as well:  if the Sun was dying for
> natural causes, or because of the actions of Typhon, and if there was
> no feasible way to evacuate Urth to other settled planets, and the
> destruction of Urth was the only way to cause this "long term
> resurrection," then I would agree that it is a "good thing" in the
> ultimate sense, and the casualties are unfortunately necessary.
>
> But we know, textually, that the Hierogrammates are behind the dying
> Sun, that there are other settled planets, and that evacuation was
> feasible.  The difference between an airlift and the flooding, other
> than the millions (billions?) of lives saved, is that it wouldn't
> advance the Hierogrammates' eugenic agenda.
>
>
>
>
>   ------------------------------
>
> avast! Antivirus <http://www.avast.com/>: Outbound message clean.
>
> Virus Database (VPS): 081204-0, 12/04/2008
> Tested on: 12/5/2008 9:31:57 AM
> avast! - copyright (c) 1988-2008 ALWIL Software.
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Urth Mailing List
> To post, write urth at urth.net
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20081205/16be0aaf/attachment-0005.htm>


More information about the Urth mailing list