(urth) Mystery of Ascia/Agia

[Son of Witz]

On Jan 20, 2011, at 2:25 PM, Andrew Mason <andrew.mason53 at googlemail.com> wrote:

> .Son of Witz wrote:
> 
>> North Americans could very well be Asian by the time of the story.
> 
> But each country has (allegedly) a natural type to which the people
> living in it conform after twenty generations or so. So even if North
> Americans are descended from people who now live in Asia, they
> shouldn't look Asian.
> 

Fair point.
I don't know anything about that biological theory. Sounds very theoretical.  I also wonder when that idea came into vogue.  I don't expect/require Hard SF rules for this sort of thing, personally.

Though, we are talking about a humanity that has cloning and other means of controlling age and appearances. Couldn't they stay looking how they want to look?  I think so. We are also talking about an intervening period when Humanity lost it's wild-side.  I read this as a sort of robo-comunist-humanity, and I think it connects to the Kim Lee Soong era.  My first and current take was, like I said earlier, a future where a communist China and allies dominated and shaped humanity similarly to the Ascian's we see, who have their humanity nearly destroyed.  I think we are meant to connect these entities between the eras. This makes the heirodules siding with the Commonwealth very consistant with their giving back humanitie's wikdness.

 This was all really intuitive to me, I might just be projecting BS.

>> Clearly, these stand-ins for the "Godless Communists" embodied in Wolfe's life by the asians he combatted.
> 
> Could be - but I don't think that means they have to have Asian
> physical features.

Sure. I certainly envisioned the Ascians in the battle of Orithya (sp?) as asian.
And what of the "garbled sing song" language.  Not trying to be racist, but that certainly sounds like Mandarin to me.  I don't know the sound of Korean well, but in SAn Francisco one hears a lot of Mandarin.  It's an apt, but indelicate way to describe the sound.


>> Isn't Halavard from the Xanthic lands? He seems Scandinavian.
> 
> Don't think so - he's from the Southern islands (which really exist in
> South America). If he were from the Xanthic lands you wouldn't expect
> him to be fighting for the Commonwealth.
>> 

Thanks. That was a brain-fart.
Of course, the Yellow Lands could be Asia. Makes a rude sense. But that doesn't say there aren't asians on another continent.

AND...
Here is yet another speculative take on their name that makes me think there is more to the story.
As Master Ash says:

“The men without shadows. It is one of those names, of which there are many, that are in error and yet perfectly correct."..."You call your enemies Ascians, which of course is not what they call themselves, because your fathers believed they came from the waist of Urth, where the sun is precisely overhead at noon. The truth is that their home is much farther north. Yet Ascians they are. In a fable made in the earliest morning of our race, a man sold his shadow and found himself driven out everywhere he went. No one would believe that he was human.”

So, here we have a name which is based on a sort of ploughman's error but made true by the Soothsayer.  I think it HIGHLY probable that the true source of this name is NOT a metaphysical insult, but rather the remnants of the label Asian.  

So, if my theory is right, that the culture of Kim Lee Soong was asian, and this culture is the humanity that spread into the universe with war, and that this culture still survives in Ascia, it makes perfect sense to think that "asian" is a much more likely source "soulless.".

Someone will probably mention that this is a translation of Severian's book, so the terms are approximate, but if that voids this, then all metonymic and earthly myth associations are just as invalidated.
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