(urth) Faterh Inire

[David Stockhoff]

On 10/14/2011 12:14 PM, Jeff Wilson wrote:
> On 10/14/2011 9:54 AM, David Stockhoff wrote:
>>
>>
>> On 10/14/2011 6:59 AM, larry miller wrote:
>>> yeah OK I can see the prospect of Inire going back seeking knowledge
>>> from the past. Maybe he wished to learn all he could about humanitys
>>> religious beliefs to help him propagate the New Suns legend in the far
>>> future? I am aware of Urth being in a previous universe than our own
>>> but it was always my understanding that the Urth iteration and ours
>>> were still very similiar (the Apollo landing picture, or the
>>> Antechambers references to Alice in Wonderland for example).
>> Well, if it's an iteration, it's going to be similar. The iterations get
>> "better."
>>
>> It's complicated by the fact that (AFAICT) Severian is in the future of
>> that iteration which is in our past. His universe is older than ours but
>> has not yet been born. Thus the translator's note about excavating the
>> deep future.
>
> We can suppose that the translator "G.W." believes it is from our 
> absolute future due to the futuristic details of the ms and the 
> anachronistic artifacts associated with it. He believes he has been 
> shown buildings in our time that will endure into this future era, but 
> this is all circumstantial.
>
> My money is still on the authorital-afterthought hypothesis, where 
> Wolfe writes about this future age, then belatedly realizes Severian 
> being in the absolute as well as relative future has blasphemous 
> implications and retroactively (heh) places Sev's story in a previous 
> incarnation to avoid making no-Jesus Urth an improvement over 
> with-Jesus Earth or making G-d's promise to Noah a lie.
I'd think he would have thought of that earlier, being a smart guy, but 
it's all good.


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