(urth) Short Sun blog review

[Roy C. Lackey]

James Wynn quoted and wrote:
> > Roy-
> > I realize that the lack of evidence for a propaganda campaign in the
Urth
> > Cycle doen't prove anything, but neither does your supposition of such a
> > campaign prove that it existed.
>
> I never claimed that there was anything detailing Typhon's reasons for
> the Whorl Project. Wolfe has already implied that he didn't consider
> that question much himself. I was merely responding to the following:
>
> > Roy-
> > The people on Urth would never see the_Whorl_, never receive the
message.

And I was refering, in that line, to Lemur's comment:
"A certain ruler, a man who had the strength to rule alone and so called
himself the monarch, built our whorl, Patera. It was to be a message from
himself to the universe." (LAKE, 298)

> > Typhon was raw ego. Mt. Typhon's sole purpose was to flaunt his face and
> > gratify his ego. He did not deprecate his memory or that of his family
among
> > the colonists, he just changed the family names to reflect the new
reality
> > of their digitized existence as gods in Mainframe.
>
> I was trying to show that the Whorl _would have been_ a useful monument
> to Typhon's ego for his subjects on Urth, even though I argue that it
> was not really much of a monument to his ego for those who left.

Wolfe's answer in the Q & A was:
" Knowing Typhon as I do, he probably had at least half a dozen  purposes;
but certainly one of the chief must have been self-aggrandizement -- to
return human kind to the stars would be a very great thing indeed." Lemur's
comment speaks directly to the self-aggrandizement issue. The universe is a
little bigger than Urth, and Urth itself would never receive that message.
Therefore, the message Typhon sent to the universe by launching the _Whorl_
was intended for a larger audience than the people of Urth, who already
lived under his tyranical rule.

> Incidentally, there is a conversation between the Rajan and Hound that I
> think touches on some of this:
>
>     "You're saying that everybody could have been asleep? All of us? No
>     houses and no people, just trees and animals?"
>     "No, I'm saying Pas must have considered that and rejected it as
>     unworkable, or at least undesirable."
>     Hound nodded. "He'd have had nobody to worship him."
>     "That's true, though I'm not sure it was a consideration. If it
>     didn't seem so impious, I'd say now that the Chapter and the
>     manteions seem almost to have been a joke, that Pas made himself our
>     chief god largely because it amused him.
>     [snip the parable of the farmer meeting Pas in Mainframe]
>     "Pas wished to mold and guide us; and for him to do it, we had to be
>     awake. As our chief god, he was ideally situated, though the false
>     memories given the sleepers may  have been intended to serve the
>     same purpose. Like the farmer we complain of storms, but Pas must
>     have foreseen that there would be storms--and things far worse--on
>     the new whorls. How could we cope with them if we never saw snow, or
>     a wind storm?"
>
>     One thing though. I have said that Typhon deprecated the memory of
>     his Terrestrial achievements among the colonists so they would not
>     remember who sent them and try to return. An obvious question would
>     be, then why did he mess with the memories of the sleepers?
>     ~ page 131 of RTTW pb.
>
> There's more as well, including an argument for why Pas's construction
> of the Whorl was not purely malevolent or egotistical ("Pas was made by
> the Outsider"). Remember that _Pas_ could not be a  god on the colonized
> planets. Even the Writings made it clear that the Nine were only gods on
> the Whorl.

The list of characters in RTTW says Typhon was "the ancient tyrant whose
personality became PAS". Whatever rehabilitation of character he *may* have
undergone in Mainframe as Pas has no bearing on the *fact* that he was an
egotistical tyrant when he was scanned and when he conceived, constructed,
stocked and launched his "message from himself to the universe".

-Roy