(urth) started my second read of New Sun

[Craig Brewer]

This idea reminds me of (the decidedly UN-Catholic) Milton's notion of a spectrum of purity among levels of existence in Paradise Lost. The angel Raphael explains this to Adam:


O Adam, one Almighty is, from whom
All things proceed, and up to him return,
If not deprav’d from good, created all
Such to perfection, one first matter all,
Indu’d with various forms, various degrees
Of substance, and in things that live, of life;
But more refin’d, more spirituous, and pure,
As nearer to him plac’t or nearer tending
Each in thir several active Spheres assign’d,
Till body up to spirit work, in bounds
Proportion’d to each kind. So from the root
Springs lighter the green stalk, from thence the 
leaves
More aery, last the bright consummate flow’r
Spirits odorous breathes: flow’rs and thir fruit
Man’s nourishment, by gradual scale sublim’d
To vital spirits aspire, to animal,
To intellectual, give both life and sense,
Fancy and understanding, whence the Soul
Reason receives, and reason is her being,
Discursive, or Intuitive; discourse
Is oftest yours, the latter most is ours,
Differing but in degree, of kind the same. (5. 
469-490)



----- Original Message ----
From: David Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net>
To: urth at lists.urth.net
Sent: Mon, May 17, 2010 2:34:35 PM
Subject: Re: (urth) started my second read of New Sun

This is perhaps the best description/explanation for what Wolfe "seems" to be doing in NS as I have seen. I've had a difficult time grasping the Increate's purpose in all the hugger-mugger of BOTNS. Treating this idea as an existing SF trope to which Wolfe formulates a penetrating response makes it work for me, and it fits Wolfe's interest in the "wrong" path being just as good as the "right" path if it takes one to the same place. Also, there is the (Platonic? Older?) idea of all matter in the universe striving to purge itself and rejoin God/become divine, which if considered a basic material force in the universe makes much more sense as the basis for such a vast "conspiracy" than some deistic tinkerer creating and destroying universes in succession with absolute inefficiency when he could just as well ... not create anything at all. If every race, every atom experiences this "Uplift" effect then it is clearly something inherent in all things. The
 mechanism by which this occurs for each race becomes less important to work out. There remains a certain cheesiness to the whole scheme, but I take that as comedy, as well as a celebration of pulp SF. ------------------------------ Message: 7 Date: Mon, 17 May 2010 14:01:45 -0500 From: Lane Haygood <lhaygood at gmail.com> To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net> Subject: Re: (urth) started my second read of New Sun Message-ID: <AANLkTikyCYMmZMW8sPXESpu9wXcxAYDHYmS70Dt86wdF at mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 1:41 PM, Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <danldo at gmail.com> wrote:

> > While de Chardin has not been officially denounced as a heretic, severe
> > "warnings" are attached to his work by the Roman Catholic Church.
> >
>  

Which has not, of course, kept Roman Catholic authors from utilizing
his philosophy and theology as the basis for their stories.

I think Wolfe, unlike Simmons, might stop short of saying that man
will surpass God as the Hieros surpassed Man.  The idea of man
creating his superior is not foreign to sf; robotics (and more
recently) genetic manipulation have produced many such stories.  The
trope of the created surpassing the creator, the student defeating the
master, etc., is a very common one.

But Wolfe (who loves to f$%! with tropes) might be stopping this one
up a bit short.  Maybe the evolution isn't so much circular as it is
spiral-shaped... ever increasing but always falling short of the true
majesty of the Increate because no matter how great the successive
lower-universe iterations get, all the way from protozoa to
Hierogrammates to angels or whatever, they are all still bounded by
temporality and being subject to this notion of change from one thing
to the other, of growth.  The very potential for change and becoming
greater necessarily acts as a self-imposed limit by making such
creatures subject to the flow of time.  The Increate, by being outside
time proper (whence a name like "Outsider?") is therefore in no danger
of ever changing or becoming "better." Such commonplace relational
notions as "better" or "worse" do not apply to such a being.

The very possibility of evolution, then, the great strength of
mortality, is also a limiting a condition that would prevent the
Teilhardian "final evolution."

LH


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