# brown book stories, their relevance *The Urth list — 2 messages, 2 voices, 06 May 2002* > 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. --- ### Michael Andre-Driussi *06 May 2002, 23:37* >> Josh Geller quoted blattid and wrote: >> ... It's >> pretty clear why the story of Dr. Death is present in "The Island of >> Doctor Death and Other Stories"; it's a little less clear why the >> "brown book" stories are present in tBotNS, but there's no doubt in >> anyone's mind that they're fiction and that they're there for a good >> and sufficient reason. > They are not just fiction: they are myth. They express patterns of history > in easily understood and transmissible terms. > > 'The Story Of The Student And His Son' is (among many other things) the > story of the Monitor and the Virginia (the Merrimac: from the US civil > conflict of the 1860's) overlaid upon the story of Theseus. > > The one about the wolves and 'Fish and Frog' is (again, among many other > things) an interplanetary war overlaid on the founding myth of Rome. I wrote "A Closer Look at the Brown Book" (New York Review of Science Fiction #54, Feb. 1993). I remain quite interested. To blattid: I think there are strong parallels between the stories and Severian's story: clearly they are oracular to Severian's situation, but I wanted to trace them down and find what patterns I could. Patterns they share with each other, patterns they share with the Urth Cycle. They seem to impart a sense of the vast sweep of posthistory, giving a historical feeling. The shortest answer might be to say that they are hologramic fragments of the entire Urth Cycle. To Josh Geller: But I don't recall an interplanetary war in "The Tale of a Boy Called Frog." The childhood and youth of the person who would eventually become the first galactic Emperor, yes, I can see that--but interplanetary war within the tale, that escapes me. Please tell me more! =mantis= SIRIUS FICTION booklets on Gene Wolfe, John Crowley Lexicon Urthus out of print! http://www.siriusfiction.com/ --- ### Dan'l Danehy-Oakes *06 May 2002, 23:51 · follows Michael Andre-Driussi* Mantis said some stuff. > To blattid: I think there are strong parallels between the stories and > Severian's story: clearly they are oracular to Severian's situation, Precisely -- they are parables, as I said the other week; but they are at least partially parables he tells to himself, for his own benefit. > To Josh Geller: But I don't recall an interplanetary war in "The Tale of a > Boy Called Frog." Dude, the whole bit where Frog's brother comes and they fight and they build the city. ---