(urth) What's So Great About Ushas?

[Eric Ortlund]

From: urth-bounces at lists.urth.net [mailto:urth-bounces at lists.urth.net]
On Behalf Of Dave Tallman
Sent: Thursday, June 05, 2008 1:03 PM
To: urth at urth.net
Subject: Re: (urth) What's So Great About Ushas? [mx][spf]



thalassocrat wrote:


	I've argued at length previously for just that inversion. Was it

	
	worth killing almost everybody on Urth to restore the Sun, just
one 
	star among many with human-populated worlds?

 
b sharp wrote: 


	For me, it is clear that Wolfe means to depict Urth as populated
by a flawed
	race of people.  For the universes to have a better future, this
flawed race needs
	to be wiped out, starting over from scratch.

 
Both of these moral arguments are missing something, in my view. They
are only concerned with what happens to the human race.
Environmentalists call this anthropocentrism, and they consider it a
serious moral flaw. The whole Urth and its ecosystem was at stake, not
just humanity. Typhon's empire started an interstellar war, and as a
side effect the Sun was damaged. The whole Urth would lose millions of
years of life, for countless species and new ones yet to evolve. Is it a
good and just solution for the human race to jet off into space and
leave Urth to freeze? I don't think Wolfe would agree, based on his
short stories like "Beautyland." Shouldn't humanity pay some price to
put things right? (That's an argument that has some application today,
too).

What's so great about Ushas?  It might be awesome in the long run. When
Sev asked to find the garden, the Autarch opened a way to the Garden
(though he thought Sev wouldn't be permitted to enter, and he was
right). It might be the Edenic future of humanity in harmony with nature
(as the Green Man also indicated).


I agree with what's said above here.  I find the "moral inversion"
argument unconvincing for two reasons.  First, Urth of the New Sun has
several characters say that the trial isn't fair and that what happens
isn't strictly fair, and that there's no way it could be - it is a
matter of making is as close to fair as possible, with everyone
realizing that the coming of the New Sun won't be just.  Even Severian
seems to recongize this; he plays on his own identity as a torturer in
the fifth book several times.  Second, I can't help but suspect that if
the plot of the books unfolded in such a way that Severian refused to
bring the new sun, because it would involve wiping out so many people,
with the result that the sun died out, another sort of "moral inversion"
argument would be made that Severian was being unjust to the people who
would die as a result of that; I can't help but wonder if complaints
would be registered regardless of what Severian did.  

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