(urth) Mystery of Ascia/Agia

[Son of Witz]

On Jan 21, 2011, at 4:29 AM, Andrew Mason <andrew.mason53 at googlemail.com> wrote:

> Son of Witz wrote:
> 
>>> 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.
> 
> It's not a real-world theory; it's a Wolfean theory, put forward by
> Severian in _Urth_. I'm not sure if Wolfe actually believes it, or if
> it's a fig-leaf for the existence of what seem to be current races
> millions of years in the future.

That leeps getting mentioned. I just read it and don't remember it. Quote please?


>> 
>> 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.".
> 
> I certainly hope it's not a comment on a particular culture. _Long
> Sun_ and _Short Sun_ seem to show that all cultures are prone to war -
> we get Arabs fighting (probably) South Americans, Indians fighting
> Chinese, Italians fighting one another, and Dutch people having a
> revolution. And the Ascian set up wasameant to overcome this tendency
> to war, though the Autarch doesn't think it's a good way of doing so.
>> 


I don't think he is trying to say that Asians embody this.
I think it is that he imagined communism taken to it's extreme, and that he imagined the communists in this battle like the ones he knew in life.