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<div><span class="gmail_quote">On 12/5/08, <b class="gmail_sendername">David Stockhoff</b> <<a href="mailto:dstockhoff@verizon.net">dstockhoff@verizon.net</a>> wrote:</span>
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<div text="#000000" bgcolor="#ffffff"><pre>John---
I agree, and I especially like your formulation of "the kind of Messiah humanity deserves." That's why such a Bad Example as Severian can be Epitome. What Urth deserves is the whole point.
Question: How do we know evacuation was feasible? I suppose the starsailship could have been used an infinite number of times to evacuate millions at a time via time travel, but I don't recall it being mentioned.
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<div>I think Master Ash comments that most of humanity was evacuated before the final freeze.</div>
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Also, I have always simply assumed, in the absence of any direct evidence, that we are to regard all of humanity outside the Commonwealth as no longer really human---if the Ascians are any indication---and therefore no loss whatsoever, though they had an equal chance of surviving the Flood. But even if the Fountain is just a eugenics program, it's still complicated by a lack of information. Was the purpose to weed out those not worthy, and to decide whether the remainder were worthy?
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<div>This is I think the opposite of what Wolfe intends. Yes, the Pelerine says that the Ascians are animals, and the name "without shadows" is tantilizingly like "without souls."</div>
<div> </div>
<div>But the Story of Loyal to the Group of Seventeen seems to suggest that human individuality has endured despite the repressive Ascian culture.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>I think I remember Severian speculating that Loyal could communicate anything he wished to.</div>
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Message: 5
Date: Thu, 4 Dec 2008 15:50:41 -0500
From: "John Watkins" <a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="mailto:john.watkins04@gmail.com" target="_blank"><john.watkins04@gmail.com></a><span class="q">
Subject: Re: (urth) An Old mystery ...
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<blockquote type="cite"><pre><span>> </span>So, for me, the destruction of Urth to create Ushas is not a monstrous act.
<span>> </span>If there is no afterlife in New Sun, if the Increate isn't real (no matter
<span>> </span>how conscious his servants are of his wishes), then the destruction of Ushas
<span>> </span>is a brutal and monstrous one. If the Increate is real, and there is some
<span>> </span>sort of Life of the Soul in the books (of which textual evidence you've
<span>> </span>asked for I would posit all of the discussion of the survival of Severian's
<span>> </span>'personality' through so many types of death, and the corridors of time
<span>> </span>themsevles) then this act, the destruction of Urth, the 'hitting of the
<span>> </span>reset button' is no longer monstrous, but another instance of the Increate
<span>> </span>hitting the reset button like he did with Noah, or Sodom, or countless other
<span>> </span>examples.
</pre></blockquote></span><pre>My point isn't that there's no Life of the Soul in the Urth books--I
think there pretty clearly is, at least of some sort.
But that Life of the Soul seems wholly divorced from the flooding of
Urth. There is nothing literally redemptive about the destruction of
Urth--it's just a big eugenics project, undertaken by artificial
lifeforms who claim to be doing the will of God. I think the
comparison with Noah is much more apt than the comparison with the
Second Coming, and maybe the reading that Severian is "the kind of
Messiah humanity can produce," or maybe even "the kind of Messiah
humanity deserves" is dead-on.
I'll just reply to Son of Witz here as well: if the Sun was dying for
natural causes, or because of the actions of Typhon, and if there was
no feasible way to evacuate Urth to other settled planets, and the
destruction of Urth was the only way to cause this "long term
resurrection," then I would agree that it is a "good thing" in the
ultimate sense, and the casualties are unfortunately necessary.
But we know, textually, that the Hierogrammates are behind the dying
Sun, that there are other settled planets, and that evacuation was
feasible. The difference between an airlift and the flooding, other
than the millions (billions?) of lives saved, is that it wouldn't
advance the Hierogrammates' eugenic agenda.
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