(urth) Urth Digest, Vol 76, Issue 173

[Jeff Wilson]

On 12/21/2010 1:17 PM, James Wynn wrote:
> I agree it complicates matters regarding Ouen. But Time-traveling is
> worse in some ways. You put your finger on probably the most unsavory
> aspect of the Clone Solution. It makes the story not just Deterministic,
> but Super-Deterministic. Severian is not just destined to be the New
> Sun. He was existentially designed for it. That's probably the aspect of
> the The Book of the New Sun that I like the least: The entire race of
> the Hierogrammates. But Time-traveling over-determines, and
> /incestuates/ the story in the same way. And even when I understand that
> the H's are always behind the curtain --nudging Severian like NASA
> nudging Voyager around Jupiter, and even rebooting him when he
> catastrophically dies-- I'm still left with the feeling of something
> going on just beyond my field of vision. I'm not so attached to the
> Clone Solution. It's just the simplest path to get there. If there were
> evidence of a more complicated solution --if it answered an open
> question for me-- I'd probably go for that solution.

It's still a a struggle for Severian, though...and as it gradually 
becomes apparent he is being manipulated, and the manipulation 
crescendos into being part of an entire manipulated world, and the 
manipulated world crescendos into a play being put on for the benefit of 
forces yet more mysterious, and so on...it's still a valid story of how 
Sev handles all this. And I think the meta-meta-metafictional subtext is 
useful because we really can say how likely a given explanation is based 
at least somewhat on how successfully it makes an entertaining story, 
because we represent the mysterious audience.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
Computational Intelligence Laboratory - Texas A&M Texarkana
< http://www.tamut.edu/CIL >