{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/1456",
    "note": "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.",
    "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'"
  },
  "archive": "urth",
  "thread": {
    "id": 1456,
    "subject": "Thorny paradoxes",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "1999-03-30T10:36:45+00:00",
    "last": "1999-03-30T10:36:45+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0024-0103@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Tony Ellis",
        "address": "tony.ellis at futurenet.co.uk"
      },
      "date": "1999-03-30T10:36:45+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) Thorny paradoxes",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "Mathew Malthouse wrote:\nm.driussi at genie.com wrote:"
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 2,
          "text": "Furthermore, the Norse word is spelled UR+, with the plus sign being\nthat wonderful letter which we no longer have in the Anglophonic\nworld--I won't bore you with the name of it.  It is necessary,\nhowever falacious an impression it creates, to spell words with \"+\"\nas having either \"th\" (which rudely approximates the phonetic value)\nor \"d\" (which rudely captures the essence of the letter's shape,\nsince it looks like \"a crossed d\")."
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "Com'on, don't be shy. It's a thorn, yes? (The letter that printers used y for,\nas in ye=the)"
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "-That's- thorn, yes. But I wouldn't describe it as a crossed \"d\", more an angular\n\"P\"."
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "Incidentally 'Urth', from very first seeing the word, put me in mind of 'Ur-\",\nas in, well I can't explicayte it to my satisfaction but as in Ur-gold and\nUr-Viles."
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Me too. But then the prefix \"ur\" is used to mean earliest, or most primitive, so\ntechnically speaking we were right to do so. :-) I also used to wonder if there\nwas supposed to be some suggestion of Ur, the ancient Chaldean city, which really\nwas way off the mark..."
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "Roy wrote:\n    But that is precisely where the paradox occurs. That chapter, chapter\nXXXVII, is titled \"The Book of the New Sun\". The title implies, if anything,\nthat Canog is the author of _TBotNS_."
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Well, it says on the back of my battered Arrow paperback that it is volume one of\n\"The Book of the New Sun\", so isn't that TBotNS too?  I did carefully say 'If you\ncan accept that Severian's narrative constitutes, either wholly or in part, the\n\"lost\" Book of the New Sun on which Dr Talos says his play is based'. If you don't\nwant to accept that, fair enough, I'm not entirely sure that I do. -But-, there\ndoes seem to be more than one Book of the New Sun. There's the one which the\nimprisoned Thecla requests from her local lending library, which by definition\ncannot be \"lost\", and there is the one Dr Talos's play is based on, which -is-\ndescribed as lost. There's at least one other reference to The Book of the New Sun\nbeing lost, too."
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": " Regardless of who put pen to paper when--Sev, Dr. Talos, Canog, or\nanother--none of them originated the story."
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Severian is an eye-witness. Where everyone else is writing second or third hand,\nhe's writing about events that he himself has taken part in. You can't get much\nmore original than that. Yes, he fudges the events of Urth's last day when\nrelating them to Canog, but later he puts this right by witnessing them first hand\nand writing about them."
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "    Which brings me to Dr. Talos again. He is several times mentioned as\ntinkering with the script of the play to accommodate his circumstances. When\nhe does so is he changing history/destiny?"
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "A fun idea, but I don't think so. In the play the Contessa sees a mysterious\nfigure, in UOTNS we learn that this is Severian, but he's not there because he\nread it in Dr Talos's play. He only makes the connection at that moment. But he\nwill now write about this encounter. If his manuscript goes back in time, this\nargues that actual events drive the content of the play, rather than the content\nof the play driving events."
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}