(urth) Chronology

[Sergei SOLOVIEV]

Ymar had contacts with Yesod and hierogrammates - he could very well be 
taken
forward in time before he become an autarch? Or after his visit to Yesod?

As to Typhon - he was a ruler of the whole Urth, and the last who ruled 
it all.
Even if it was called Commonwealth, it was another state. He was overthrown
in a mass rebellion. If we take the empires in our own recent past - 
destroyed
by social movements, revolutions etc. - and new states born, seldom
the history of the Empire is studied, rather rejected (except maybe in 
the state that feels itself
its successor). Take British Empire, queen Victoria and India. Or 
Austro-Hungarian
Empire - its history is studied in Austria but not much by Tcheks or 
Hungarians.
Who was their last Emperor? Do you remember?

Best

Sergei

Gerry Quinn wrote:
>
> From: "Lee Berman" <severiansola at hotmail.com>
>>> Antonio Pedro Marques:
>
>>> I find the chronology overall very confusing but I'm certain
>>> it is just as GW intended it, because he didn't have any gun to his 
>>> head not to make
>>> it correct....No, I don't think he would introduce brutal 
>>> incoherence into latter works
>>> just because it would be cool to have this or that episode happen. 
>>> And I don't find the
>>> 'it's all different universes' theory satisfying.
>
> The incoherence of introducing Ymar is not all that brutal if one does 
> not try to closely analyse the story as a realistic history. Perhaps 
> Wolfe underestimated how hard readers would pluck at the threads. The 
> Ymar episode is a cool story, and it may be that Wolfe thought its 
> coolness would outweigh the questions raised by the quick succession 
> of Ymar. Or perhaps he felt that the rapid succession of Ymar was 
> plausible. After all, it might not have been all that rapid. Perhaps 
> Ymar only attained the Autarchy in his fifties, after decades of chaos.
>
>
>> I admit that mapping timelines is of far less interest to me than to 
>> many other Wolfe fans.
>> To borrow a Gerry line, I'd rather just read the story Gene Wolfe 
>> wrote. But I am glad
>> some people take the trouble to do it. It can be helpful. But I am 
>> willing to accept that
>> some story elements won't jibe perfectly with others.
>
> By that line I did not mean to mock your intelligence. But ideas like 
> "Ceryx is Inire" do read to me like notions that are transplanted from 
> some completely other book. Ceryx is a clearly human necromancer who 
> appears briefly to challenge Severian the Conciliator in UotNS. At the 
> end of the chapter he appears in, he is killed by a mob. Inire is a 
> clearly alien vizier who works for many autarchs including Severian at 
> a later time; he is overtly present only in BotNS and while he 
> presumably knows many magics/technologies, he is not observed to delve 
> in necromancy. When Wolfe wrote Inire, we can be certain that Ceryx 
> was not in his mind, or it would truly have been a different book! 
> Really, an idea like this needs a lot of justification. Instead, it 
> comes in the very next paragraph after a theory that the Cumaean is 
> Ymar's never-mentioned twin sister is refuted!
>
>
>>> How come Scylla sounds so childish in comparison to Tartaros if she 
>>> was older and they were
>>> scanned at the same time?
>>
>> As the girl with snake-arms on the ship in RttW? Or when Scylla 
>> possesses Chenille in LotLS? I think
>> in Chenille she sounds like a haughty young woman, roughly of 
>> Chenille's age. She certainly
>> doesn't sound as young as Cilinia to me. Tartaros does sound older, 
>> wiser and world-weary. Maybe,
>> even in scanned form, he has experienced more pain and sorrow than 
>> Scylla. Perhaps one can mature
>> as a computer program?
>
> That is a strange point about Scylla, certainly. In her Window she 
> appears as a young girl on the cusp of womanhood, and Tartaros tells 
> us that the gods appear to us as they see themselves. I lean to the 
> view that Tartaros matured, while Scylla did not, before or after 
> scanning, or both.
>
> I don't see why one should not mature as a computer program. Most of 
> Wolfe's computerised people are embodied in humanoid androids of some 
> kind, and I think there is considerable evidence that they are similar 
> to people in most ways including the ability to change. It is probably 
> more difficult for disembodied programs, and also for god-like rulers, 
> and Scylla and Tartaros were both - but I would not say it is impossible.
>
> - Gerry Quinn
>
>
>
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