# Sev and Thecla in childhood + Free Live Free *The Urth list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 22 Sep 1998* > Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright > in each message remains with the person who wrote it. > Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original > archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than > retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact. --- ### Peter Stephenson *22 Sep 1998, 10:30* > Jon Camfield wrote: > "...I played again with pebbles in the courtyard beside the fallen curtain > wall, as Thecla dodged the hooves of my father's mounted guard" > (II, XXV, 204) I do find it hard to escape the implication that Severian's real father is intended, and that somehow Severian and Thecla combined have worked out who he is --- what else could it mean? No dream or daydream in the Book is that alone, just as nothing real fails to have the faint aura of a dream. I'm not convinced it makes sense that they know, but maybe a strong likeness with a bit of subconscious deduction is intended. Free Live Free: I didn't really like this. Part of the problem is Wolfe's post-New-Sun style, which for my taste contains too much flabby and unenlightening dialogue over trifles (all right, so at least it's realistic :-)). To go with the offbeat story, I was expecting more sense that something deeper was going on, but didn't get it. On the whole I quite liked the ending even if I didn't quite understand how it all tied in. The fantasy element seemed unconnected with the rest of the novel, though that's not so uncommon in modern fiction (John Fowles' `A Maggot' seems to have something similar going on). Maybe it's all down to Wolfe's wish to write a particular sort of not-quite-mainstream novel. Corncrake ``` Peter Stephenson Tel: +39 50 844536 WWW: http://www.ifh.de/~pws/ Gruppo Teorico, Dipartimento di Fisica Piazza Torricelli 2, 56100 Pisa, Italy ``` ---