{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/1594",
    "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'"
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  "archive": "urth",
  "thread": {
    "id": 1594,
    "subject": "Reverse Typology and the Inverse Alchemy of Time",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "1999-04-29T11:16:55+00:00",
    "last": "1999-04-29T11:16:55+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0026-0058@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Nigel Price",
        "address": "nigelprice1 at compuserve.com"
      },
      "date": "1999-04-29T11:16:55+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) Reverse Typology and the Inverse Alchemy of Time",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "This was drafted as a personal e-mail response to Jonathan Laidlow's recent\ncontribution to the list on Wolfe's Modernism.  He suggested I post it on\nthe list, so here it is...\n\n                                --0-0--\n\nDespite a lot of catch-up reading recently, I've still got six Urth lists\nsitting in my electronic in-tray, waiting to be read, so I'm afraid that I\ncan hardly be considered up to date on the current debates.  Sounds as\nthough things have taken another interesting turn, though.\n\nAs for your posting...  My initial reaction is (naturally!) that you're\nboth very right, and very wrong.  Right in pointing out the way that myths\nmutate and combine and recombine in the world of Urth so that it is\ndifficult or even impossible to map any one character or incident to any\nidentifiable religious person, symbol or symbolic narrative with absolute\nconfidence.  Wrong in that I think it is absolutely crucial to Wolfe's\nmoral and literary intentions that Severian's world should be absolutely\nreal, and one where real ethical choices are made, with genuine\nconsequences for both good and ill.  To put this into generic terms: it is\nvital that the work appears to be fantasy, whilst following a wholy\nscience-fictional rationale.\n\nAs for Urth's continuity with Earth, I think that the presence of the\nphotograph of the astronaut on the moon in Ultan's library should give us a\nfairly hefty hint that Urth is indeed our own Earth, infinitely changed and\ndegerated.\n\nI'm still trying to hammer out my own \"unified field theory\" for\nunderstanding Wolfe's beliefs and intentions, but one idea that you might\nlike to consider is that Urth of the Commonwealth exhibits a sort of\ncounter-typology, looking back to the truths of the past, rather than\nforward, as in classical typology, to truths of the future.  Thus, just as\nmany of the New Testament authors and their exegitical successors regarded\nstories in the Old Testament as prefiguring in some distorted way the\ntruths to be revealed in the new covenant (cf eg John 3.14-15, Romans\n5.12-19), so the stories and episodes recounted in Severian's world point\nback in some refracted way to myths and truths all but forgotten in the\nancient world of Urth.\n\nMy suspicion is that Wolfe regards myths as essentially elemental and\natomic, both in reality and in literature, but in the corroded and\ncorrupted world of Urth, they appear in impure compounds and alloys, rather\nthan in pure ingots of the refined metals themselves.\n\nBearing in mind Wolfe's avowed belief in the physical and spritual reality\nof the classical gods, not as rivals to the one God, but as created,\nlesser, \"spiritual\" beings, nevertheless far above, in power and majesty,\nmortal human beings, it is not hard to see how the hieros and hierogramates\nof the Urth cycle might fall into the same sort of theological pattern. \nThey are \"gods\", but not \"Gods\", and, in some neo-platonic\n(\"post-platonic\"?) way their natures and intentions will reflect the same\nunderlying and recurrent patterns that appear throughout history and in all\ncorners of the universe.\n\nBut just as, in generic terms, Wolfe fuses fantasy and science fiction to\nproduce a hybrid \"science fantasy\", so he intertwines physical reality with\nthe spiritual and theological.  The two are inextinguishable in his\nuniverse, and it becomes both possible for naturalistic, real, physical\nagents to carry out divine purposes and for the apparently divine to\nharbour only too imperfect and selfish political aims of their own.\n\nNone of which diminishes the reality of the moral choices that Wolfe asks\nhis characters to make - it merely complicates them to the nth degree!\n\nBy the way, remind me to expatiate some time on my theory as to the tension\nbetween \"grace\" and \"works\" in Wolfe's stories...\n\nNigel Price\nMinety, Wiltshire\nEngland"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}