(urth) Faterh Inire

[Lee Berman]

>larry miller: Dont worry about sounding argumentative, this is a discussion group
> after all.

 

okay! though there have been times in the past where the discussion got nasty and

even personally disrespectful to some contributors. It's been my personal goal to

try to steer away from that trend.

 

>David Stockhoff: For one thing, it has been noted that the Moffats lived before air 
>travel, yet there is a plane. This and other twists (more than I can now 
>recall) make the scene more and less than it appears. Is the scene from 
>Urth's past? Our "present"? Or another "iteration" of Earth/Urth?

>Or is it a scene of spirits called up by Inire, who built the Gardens 
>and therefore has at least some control over time?

 

I agree with David. He is good at distilling the essential points from years of 

previous discussion. I would only add that we might all agree that if nothing

else, Father Inire is a scholar, interested in collecting knowledge from other 

places and times. I'm sure this was Wolfe's intention for having him visit Africa and 

people of earth from roughly our own time frame (if Isangoma is Inire).

 

Regarding the idea of another "iteration" of Earth/Urth, I'm thinking it might be good

to ensure that larry is aware of this interpretation of BotNS. My own best evidence of

this comes from Gene Wolfe himself, from the James Jordan interview 

http://mysite.verizon.net/~vze2tmhh/wolfejbj.html#urth:

 

>JJ: This universe that you set in Briah, or part of it--is that our universe? Or is that 

>a universe that resurrected saints have set up in the world to come as part of the cities 

>that they made?

 

>GW: No. I thought of it as a long past universe. Something that we are repeating rather than 

>something that we are....I was looking at what past universes might have been like really... 

>And then I got into the idea of universal cycles. And decided that I would show that this might 

>be a past cycle. Some physicists at least think that the Big Bang is eventually going to be 

>followed by a Big Gnab in which the whole universe coalesces again which will be followed by 

>another Big Bang which is sort of like a succession of universe


 

another crucially (for me) key quote from that interview is:

 

 

>JJ: Which is another way of saying, do we have fallen angels here or some type of power that 

>really was operative in the world before the kingdom of God?

 

>GW: That is my personal belief. I think that the gods of paganism were real. But what I tried 

>to do was to write about that pagan world as the pagans themselves wrote about it. If we read 

>modern historians we are reading a very rationalistic viewpoint of this which says that all of 

>these people were absolutely wasting their time by building temples to Ares or Apollo or you name 

>it. And by offering sacrifices in worship and all that it was nothing there. Nothing at all there 

>and that whether it is true or not that certainly is not the way the people who were doing it felt. 

>They were convinced that there was something there and they had all sorts of legends and so forth 

>about the appearances of the god and in fact there is one place in the Acts where Paul and another 

>one of the apostles are mistaken for Zeus and Mercury. Zeus and Hermes, we are mixing the Latin and 

>the Greek which is what I was trying to get away from. They are mistaken for Zeus and Hermes in human 

>form because people in those days expected that you could see Zeus and Hermes in human form. I am not 

>so sure they were wrong. I am not convinced that they were wrong. We love to think how much smarter we 

>are than people of ancient times or biblical times or so forth but I am very dubious about that.