Some problems if the Pancreator/Outsider is the

James Jordan10 Jun 2002, 14:56original

2 quoted lines

At 11:45 AM 6/9/2002 -0500,Steve S. wrote: The lapsing of the church and of the sacraments would be more troubling, theologically, I agree. But it hasn't necessarily happened in Wolfe's world. For one thing, the race of mankind has spread to other stars. That the Christian church may have died on one planet would not preclude the possibility that a remnant remains. Part of what Wolfe is writing about is a society caught up in idolatry and the breaking in of the Outsider (as a thief) into that world; the lapse of the church into idolatry and the diminution of the Outsider's role in the culture's worldview is an component of that endeavor.

I think that's reasonable, but also...

1 quoted line

Don't know if I have anything to add to your point about the flood. Maybe, the idea is that the world was already destroyed, had run down, and the New Sun is its rebirth, not destruction.

.... remember that Urth is a universe-cycle before ours. These events predate the promise to Noah by about 50 billion years maybe. We don't know that such a promise had been given to any Urnoah in Urth history. Nor, returning to the first point, do we have to assume that God managed Briah precisely the same way He manages our cycle. Nutria

James Jordan14 Jun 2002, 17:19original

↳ follows, by subject match James Jordan

2 quoted lines

At 03:33 PM 6/12/2002 -0400, Rostrum wrote: I assumed that these were deliberate parodies of Islam, Judaism, Christianity, etc. by Typhon et. al. But since Typhon thought it was all bunk, he inadvertently incorporated bits that connect to the real God - references to Jesus, the Outsider, etc.

Good point. Hadn't thought of it that way. Just what Typhon might well have done.

1 quoted line

I think the only out is to either assume this is an earlier universe or that we're not supposed to try to literally fit Severian's adventures into Christian Salvation History -- they are an icon of God's work in our world, rather than literal speculation about how our story might continue.

Well put.

4 quoted lines · 1–2 deep

Well, if I recall, Tzad is a Hierogrammate. But I could be wrong.

P.S. -- Can't resist sharing this: my wife was telling our three-year-old twins stories from the Bible and they pointed to the story of the Plagues of Egypt and wanted to hear it. When she got to the part about Passover and the Angel of Death, one of girls screwed up her face and said, "Angels not do that."

Oddly, Wolfe reacted quite negatively to the God As Torturer idea when I presented it to him. I thought "Shadow of the Torturer" meant that Severian was God's shadow-agent, torturing the world through distresses toward perfection. But Wolfe did not like that. No, no. The whole torture business is Severian's horrible background out of which he is struggling to emerge as a more decent person. As for me, I like MY idea better! It certainly seems to fit the overall narrative better. Nutria

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.