(urth) Seawrack/ mother plot / + three whorls

Son of Witz sonofwitz at butcherbaker.org
Wed Mar 18 23:09:58 PDT 2009


On Mar 18, 2009, at 5:02 PM, Jordon Flato wrote:

> There are some possibilities.  Maybe Blue is where Abia's 'race' is  
> from?  I've always assumed Abia came to Urth at some point.  Must  
> have come from somewhere, no?

Dang. I didn't think of that.


On Mar 18, 2009, at 5:43 PM, James Wynn wrote:

> Dream-travel self-evidently involves or enables Time-travel. This is  
> so obvious from the Long Sun and the Short Sun stories that I'm a  
> little impatient with those that don't casually accept it. So I'd  
> best not get into it again.
>
> But I don't believe that the Short Sun is Sol.  It is a pointless  
> flourish on a narrative that is already troubling enough.

I'm cool with the dream/time travel trip. I threw it out there to see  
if there were strong objections to that idea.

I don't think SS=Sol would be a pointless flourish.
"I've drawn the three whorls again"
"Return to the Whorl"
Hoof sees Green in the sky.  He's looked at Green his whole life. If  
it wasn't Green, wouldn't he make some sort of comment about a change.
I think that if I just "traveled to another whorl, and looked up and  
saw a moon that was different than my home planet's Lune, I wouldn't  
call it Lune.

I'm not convinced, I just think the Three Whorls, and the Return make  
A LOT of thematic sense.  So much, in fact, that I'd consider two more  
Whorls in a book constantly talking about Three Whorls a pointless  
flourish.

The real problem, aside from hard SF moon distance/size tidal issues  
stuff people bring up against the idea, is that Blue has a lot of  
ruins of an ancient race, and very strange flora and fauna.  Is it at  
all possible that The Whorl jumped sequential creations? don't know.
I don't have a problem with the idea that The Whorl might have been  
out there thousands of Urth years before returning. You can't count on  
any of the cargo's timeframe ideas, can you?

but if Neighbors can be trees (I haven't really grokked Aramini's  
argument) couldn't that be descendant from the Green Man?

And every time I read about the Neighbors' anatomy, I was reminded of  
Plato's Androgyns. What were they called? they're like Two people in  
one. Some are are hetero/some homo pair ups.   Anyway, a huge theme in  
New Sun seems to be this Androgyne quality in the epitome. Much was  
made of the Old Autarch's androgyny, and of course the true Epitome  
was Severian/Thecla/+++++.   I think there is really something to this  
idea that a better humanity is truly androgynous.
Perhaps somewhere in Usha's future, these physical androgyns evolved,  
immigrated, or were engineered?  Who knows.
And, hell, if that were a "fact" in the future, it might resonate all  
the way back to create Plato's Myth about them.  :-D

~Witz






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