(urth) The Pelerine (COTA 12)

[Mr Thalassocrat]

On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 9:43 PM, Andrew Mason <andrew.mason53 at googlemail.com
> wrote:

>
> I do think Cyriaca's story is quite important, by the way, because it
> explains why, though the physical distance between our time and
> Severian's is enormous, the cultural distance at times seems strangely
> small.  The various bits of cultural inheritance haven't been handed
> down continuously; they were returned to humans by computers just a
> few thousand years before Severian.
>

... and then the knowledge was collected by Typhon, perhaps, in the library.
This is an observation which might also help to explain some of seeming
anachronisms between BOTNS and SS/LS. Languages and writings from "our" time
are present on the Whorl not because they were current in Typhon's day, but
because Typhon's cultural archeaologists put them there,

They didn't mine the past just for the Chras Writings etc, but for whole
chunks of language and culture. So eg the "Dorp culture" doesn't indicate
some totally unlikley survival of things Dutch into the deep future, but
rather an artificial reconstruction of deep-past Dutchness by the Whorl
project team.

I like this; it has the right whiff of megalomania.

Perhaps every town culture on the Whorl was just a megalo-whimsical museum
reconstruction by the Whorl team, having no roots at all in the Urth of
Typhon's day.

Viron's odd naming convention was just something they made up.

Pity the poor sleepers!
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