(urth) Urth-Earth links

[Jeff Wilson]

On 10/17/2011 10:21 AM, Gerry Quinn wrote:
> He is a man who – inspired by the sea monsters – is trying to make
> himself into a god by the use of technology. He intends to attain
> immortality, and, like many animals of our own Earth that do not die of
> old age, this requires continuous growth. He may well be centuries old
> already, and when he meets Severian at the end of _Urth_ he has not aged
> in fifty years, just grown larger.

If he roughly doubled in size during that 50 years, that implies he was 
"normal" sized about 50 years before meeting Severian, and "small" 
perhaps 20-30 years before then - plenty of time for the short-lived 
autocthons and eclectics around the lake to dissociate the two 
appearances. Maybe even longer, if the his growth rate was slower 
without the support of the water.

>  > Would it not work just as well if he's of Juturna's race and size, and
>  > those are natural gills Sev mistook for scars? Are we to believe Juturna
>  > must come up for air like a whale? What is her race anyway: is she a
>  > large human who swims deep, or a fish evolved to be humanoid? Let's get
>  > our assumptions straight.
> Juturna is not human, I believe, nor fish either. She has been created
> or spawned by one of the sea monsters. If we assume that the bean story
> refers to the sea monsters, then eggs or nanofactories or whatever were
> thrown into the seas of Urth, eventually becoming them. Their origin was
> off-Urth.
> Whether she comes up for air I don’t know, but I think if she had gills
> like Baldanders then Severian, who gave her a good looking over, would
> have noticed it.
> As for Baldanders gills being natural: Baldanders is not natural, he is
> sui generis and a self-made man, right down to the gills.

I don't believe there are any strong distinctions. Before the Short Sun 
rerconnage, the final word from on high was in URTH where the Yesodis 
say there was no extraterrestrial higher life in Briah, only Man and 
Man's modifications of himself and lower animals, and their 
modifications, etc. Baldanders gives himself gills by altering himself 
technologically, likely as did Idas' forebears and similarly those of 
the other sailors born on Urth who Sev remarks "appeared hardly human to 
me."

This implies that the great beasts are not quite the Lovecraftian Things 
we have been lead to expect, but titanic masses of quasihuman flesh that 
used to be something like an individual.  If Baldanders can double his 
size in 50 years, the thousand years since Typhon's reign could allow 
similarly growing humanoids to double 20 times over. This potentially if 
improbably allows increasing their size a million times but is more than 
enough to achieve the mountainous size claimed by Jonas.

It also would satisfy David's desire for dire beats with dread mind 
powers, because they could have the genes for psionic abilities as 
easily as Decuman and Typhon and Ceryx seem to have them.


-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at clueland.com
Computational Intelligence Laboratory - Texas A&M Texarkana
< http://www.tamut.edu/CIL >