(urth) Lupiverse)s)

[Gerry Quinn]

From: Andrew Mason 


> In any case, Wolfe fairly clearly rejects this view in the author's
> note to 'La Befana' - while the story itself does turn on the idea
> that Christ must be born anew on different planets, it's made clear
> that this is a joke. On the other hand, the way he puts it suggests
> that he _may_ actually think  the principle is true for universes.

What does he say, exactly?  I read ‘La Befana’ online but it had no author’s intro.  [My thought was that the mistake of La Befana might be to be looking among the human colonists rather than among Zozz’s people.]
Aside from the issue of looking in dogma -either of one’s own religion or the dogmas assumed to be asserted by the author – for interpretations of an SF saga, which I believe to be a questionable approach to literary analysis, the idea of a single Incarnation in iterated, slightly improving universes seems rather problematic on logical grounds.
The “Failed Jesus” of every previous iteration is just one problem.  What about iterations *subsequent* to the one with the Incarnation?  Either that is the last iteration (which is nowhere suggested) or the subsequent iterations are better than that one... and yet they also must have some sort of Failed Jesus or Post Jesus rather than the one true Jesus Christ.  How can that be?
Also, if ours is the final, perfect iteration... well, it seems like it ought to be a little bit better, doesn’t it?  Really, the universe of Urth despite various SF horrors doesn’t seem especially terrible compared to our imaginings of this one, or even our history.
- Gerry Quinn
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