Subject: (urth) UotNS

From: akt <akt at attglobal.net>
Date: Thu, 08 Feb 2001 21:28:47 +0000

>From D'l D-O:

> Perhaps this is part of what makes UotNS unsatisfactory
> by comparison? It's hardly a _bad_ book; indeed, by the
> standards of almost any other writer, it would be a
> masterpiece. But the things and relations in URTH don't
> reflect each other the way they do in NS proper. (This is
> also true of LS, and appears to be true of SS, but LS &
> SS have their own, quite different, structures ...)
>
> -- all of which is not to say that URTH doesn't have its
> own (and quite different) structural integrity: it does.
> But because of its status as a pendant to NS, the reader
> expects and, more, wants to find those reflections, and
> finds only their echoes.

I have never, ever understood this PoV, though I have heard it voiced
again and again. There seems (to me) to be a political, or perhaps
religious, anger against this book, a  feeling that its existence
betrays the True Canon (maybe the way the Jews feel about the New
Testament tacked onto the Hebrew Bible). Myself, I adore UotNS, marveled
at first reading,  and would feel the series sadly diminished without
it. The visuals are incomparable--the giant starship where Sev leaps
from deck to deck protected by his necklace, the transformations of Zak,
the stateroom of the hierodules, the burst of the New Sun, the undines
leaping in the waves, also the great, bloody undine crawling into the
throne room--what an image!--and the phantasmagoria of images from his
past judging Sev's life. And much more. Moreover, there seems to me a
valid attempt to elucidate the philosophy behind the series. Is this too
blatant for some? Not for me; I welcomed it. I liked the biblical
parallels, I didn't find them corny at all. I liked the time-travel
hocus-pocus with Burgundofara, though I didn't begin to try to make
sense of it. In fact, I think it is my favorite book of the five--I
realize that's an opinion, not a lucid argument. But I am constantly
dismayed by the denigration of this book. Or perhaps I should say again
that I don't quite understand it, and the emotion that seems to lurk
behind it.

-alga

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