(urth) This week in Google Alerts

[Dan'l Danehy-Oakes]

Once again.

TBotNS is far enough in the future that mountains containing the ruins
of long-buried cities have risen. This is not on the order of 20 or 30
thousand years; it is millions.

On Wed, Nov 2, 2011 at 7:29 AM, Gerry Quinn <gerry at bindweed.com> wrote:
>
>
> From: David Stockhoff
>> I believe the 20,000-year figure is from Wolfe. Since no major changes
>> could have occurred from "now" to Severian's time anyway, the
>> significant changes are cultural, not geographic. Yet European languages
>> are still spoken on the Whorl; even if they had to be revived for
>> Typhon's purposes, they still survived that long.
>
> Even in Severian’s time scholars retain some understanding of English, as we
> know from Thea’s disquisition about the renaming of Verthandi and Skuld.
>
> The atmosphere of BotNS has always reminded me of Robert Silverberg’s
> Nightwings, which is, if I recall correctly, set around the year 30000.
> Here the names of certain cities (Rome and Jorslem) survive.  Just as in
> BotNS, the world is pseudo-feudal with high-tech elements.  Earth is the
> clapped-out remnant of a hubristic interstellar empire and is now under the
> ownership of aliens.
>
> As far as I know Wolfe has never acknowledged any literary debt to
> Nightwings, although it was published around 1970.  Of course it may well be
> that he never read it and his and Silverberg’s visions evolved
> independently, albeit obviously from similar roots in Vance and elsewhere.
>
> - Gerry Quinn
>
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-- 
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes