Subject: All You Zombies...Re: (urth) Re: When Did You Last See Your Father?

From: Mitchell A. Bailey <mab at lindau.net>
Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 10:48:59 +0000

Kieran Cleary wrote:
> 
> >she is Catherine, his mother, then it all comes full circle. The
> child in the basket was his mother.<
> 
> I like that as a possibility, but for this to work, Catherine needs to get
> whipped back through the corridoors of time in order to meet Oeuen (sp?) so
> that she can conceive Sev. What's the rationale for this time travelling?
> 
> Also, Sev's mother was supposed to be an exultant Pelerine? Whence the
> exultant genes if her mother was Dorcas and father Sev himself?
> 
> Kieran
...
And Dorcas' first child Ouen, in whose childbirth (? or infancy, at
least) she died the first time, apparently was Sev's father! 

If we buy the idea that the new baby is Catherine, Sev becomes one of
those  "All You Zombies.." type casualty-loop casualties with no
ancestry and no beginning! 

Consider what Dr. Talos said of Baldanders when he obtained his audience
with the newly seated Autarch Severian in the Citadel: " But Baldanders
was his own creation; he stood behind himself, and cut himself off from
the line linking the rest of us with the Increate." Could the same, in
this scenario, be said of Severian? 

Recall previous discussions about parallels of episodes in Severian's
adventures with the life of Christ (e.g. the Temptation, Typhon as
Tempter). Could this be the parallel to the Virgin Birth? 

Savior, or Devil?

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

---

From: Mitchell A. Bailey <mab at lindau.net>
Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 11:54:22 +0000

> Kieran Cleary wrote:
...The
> > that she can conceive Sev....
...
...

Whoops! This is what I get for getting impulsive just before
staff-meeting time. I realize that the idea is still at this point full
of holes in that Sev would need to be the sole ancestor of Dorcas and
"Charon" [Dorcas' brokenhearted elderly widower in the boat dragging the
Lake of Birds in the Garden of Endless Sleep, Sev's grandfather] and in
turn their ancestors. 
Heinlein, you will recall, solved the dilemma in "All You Zombies.."
with a very rare hermaphroditism/sex change(call it Tieresias'
Syndrome?), but of course the protagonist came from nowhere anyway, so
why not?

Perhaps if it can be shown that all Sev's male ancestors were ultimately
himself, he could still have one or more female ancestors, e.g. Dorcas,
and the Casualty-Loop=Miraculous-Conception model might still hold,
since of course the Virgin Mary came of a conventional ancestry. 

Any clues re "Charon's" parents?