(urth) Gummed-Up Works or Got Lives?

[Gerry Quinn]

From: Dan'l Danehy-Oakes 

> Gerry Quinn wrote:

> > You said: “a sword, a giant, a sleeping beauty, magic, palaces”.  But none
> > of those are really much like their fairy-tale counterparts.  The sword has
> > no magic powers.  Baldanders, fair enough, Severian even fights him in his
> > castle, though not for gold.  Dorcas isn’t really a sleeping beauty – we
> > don’t know she was dead until she is already leaving the narrative.  Magic
> > is tech.  Palaces... the House Absolute is underground.
>
> > What we have learned of these things from fairy-tales doesn’t really help us
> > here.  They don’t mirror their fairy-tale counterparts.  BotNS really isn’t
> > a fairy-tale in any strong sense.  Or so it seems to me.
>
> > Conversely, understanding magic as technology does help us see what’s going
> > on.

> Contraconversely, understanding technology as magic, a la Clarke's
> Third Law, _also_ helps us see what's going on. Wolfe goes out of his
> way to provide a pseudoscientific explanation for at least some of
> Severian's miracles; but does anybody really believe that they are
> _not_ miracles? The clue for this is near the beginning of CLAW, where
> it is observed that the real miracle is that the laws of the Universe
> are such that the Cathedral of the Pelerines will rise
> non-miraculously: Wolfe is reminding us that there will always be a
> way to "explain away" a miracle ... but that miracles happen,
> nonetheless. (This is also my understanding of Dr Crane's
> "explanation" of Silk's enlightenment, btw: plausible bullshit.)

> tBotNS is indeed a fairy story, a once-upon-a-time whisking away of
> the reader to a land where miracles happen, giants (who somehow
> resembles Queequeg...) battle heroes, the dead walk, and monarchs live
> in invisible palaces. (Even the invisible palace hides an invisible
> palace!) If it questions the assumptions of the fairy story, and
> especially the happy ending, well so too does it question the
> assumptions of classic science fantasy: and we cannot understand that
> questioning unless we understand "what we have learned of these things
> from fairy-tales."

You are right about technology as magic, but I don’t think that BotNS maps well onto fairy stories.  Not every story containing magic is a fairy story, or a sword and sorcery tale, or any particular genre of magical tale.  I would see a typical fairy story as largely about personality (albeit often clinically insane personalities).   A dysfunctional family is frequently the main driver of the plot.  Baldanders is not so bad a fit as a fairy tale giant, but I don’t really see too many fairy tale tropes in BotNS.  

Even the fairies themselves don’t seem evident on Urth, and that is unusual for Wolfe.  You might find fairies or fairy-like beings on Blue, or even on the Whorl - and perhaps they will return to Ushas - but on Urth they have been crushed under the weight of ages.  There are new monsters, but no real fairies or ghosts.  Anything even vaguely close is a consequence of technology or physics.

- Gerry Quinn


   


 
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