(urth) Thea's Identity

Jeff Wilson jwilson at clueland.com
Mon Apr 22 12:42:55 PDT 2013


On Mon, April 22, 2013 08:33, Thomas Bitterman wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 20, 2013 at 9:56 PM, Jeff Wilson <jwilson at clueland.com> wrote:
>
>> On Fri, April 19, 2013 10:21, DAVID STOCKHOFF wrote:
>> >> From: Lee Berman <severiansola at hotmail.com>
>> >>>As another bonus, the Autarch is the "self-ruled", or, more
>> >>> colloquially, "the boss of
>> >>>himself".  Who actually does what the Autarch tells them?  The
>> servants
>> >>> of the House
>> >>>Absolute, and the army.  If both the servants and the soldiers are
>> >>> (pretty much) clones,
>> >>>then he is literally just the boss of himself. It's the type of joke
>> >>> that feels unfunny
>> >>>in just the right way for Wolfe to have made it.
>>
>> Meh. The servants seem to have no trouble maintaining loyalty to the new
>> Autachs,
>
>
> The new Autarch is a (semi-)clone of the old one, hence closely related to
> the servants.
>
> and it would make the Torturers, Witches, Librarians, and
>> Stewards curious exceptions to the auto-cloning rule, as we know they
>> get
>> at least some of their number from outside the House and Citadel.
>
>
> With the exception of Severian, do any of the above ever become Autarch?
> I
> was under the impression it was always household staff.

IIRC, we're told only that previous minds that awake inside Severian
include some relatively humble people including children and charwomen.
They may or may not have been Autarch in their time.

But that's beside the point. Torturers and Witches are observed to come
from the wombs of prisoners, Ultan comes to the librarians from the
Exultants, and Odilio the steward succeeded a visible father.

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




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