Subject: (urth) sev's 2nd book

From: maa32 <maa32 at dana.ucc.nau.edu>
Date: Fri, 11 Jul 2003 05:59:00 +0000

Severian goes to some length during writing Book of the New Sun to address his 
readers personally, which means that he expects to have some.  Yet at the 
opening of  Urth of the New Sun, he claims no one will ever read his new 
narrative. So he has some new information at the time of his scribbling.  How 
far after his arrival on the little island with the sleeping gods (always a 
sad description in my mind) did he begin writing Urth of the New Sun?  Is he 
immortal? In any case, casting the second copy out into space implies that he 
has some slight presentiment that Urth is screwed and that the first copy is 
insufficient - he takes a shot in the dark or a lottery chance that it will 
wind up somewhere to be read, whereas the one in the library might have 
already been given up as lost even before his trial.  That's a lot of copying, 
eh?

Yeah, it's hard to read the document as "solely" political, but certainly he 
had some personal motivation in writing the whole thing twice.

BTW, I think Wolfe will be at Readercon this year (this month, eh?).  I don't 
know anything about it, and I won't be there, but he mentioned something of 
the sort.

Marc Aramini

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