Astral travel in time

I took the apparent changes in the inhuma's story to be the product of Silkhorn's seeming ability, while awake, to influence her storytelling, not that he was actually able to change the past, whether he did it unconsciously or deliberately. To accord Silkhorn the ability to change the past, as Andrew has already suggested, opens up a Pandora's box that, once opened, not only can't be closed again, but potentially lets out more possibilities than the box could ever have held to begin with. Where does Silkhorn's power to change the past come from, and where does it stop? Why shouldn't he go back in the past to change any number of outcomes he didn't like, things that were a lot more important to him and the other humans who came to the Blue-Green system than the particular inhuma sitting at the table? If Silkhorn has the power to change the past, then almost anything becomes possible, there are no logical rules and we might as well be trying to find meaning in nonsense rhymes. I can't explain the appearance of the Silk-like and Oreb-like figures in the old woman's story, but if Silkhorn traveled back in time to spook somebody, he not only did it off-stage, he exercised his power, in my opinion, rather trivially and arbitrarily. -Roy

Okay, to begin with, it probably isn't "his" power, but that of the Outsider, Whom he serves. I doubt he even knows he does it.(The Narrator is brain-numbingly good at not knowing stuff about himself: not so much an unreliable narrator as an unreliable observer.)

I have no doubt that he would if he (knew he) could. However, this is not the Outsider's focus. The Outsider (Who is the Christian God) is interested in individuals, souls, not mass movements.

If he did it of his own volition - yes. If the Outsider/Increate/God did, however, then it has some extremely important meaning in the lives of the participants -- to which the Narrator is probably not privy. --Dan'l

Couldn't Silkhorns power here be described as changing the memory of an event (inserting a new memory) through story-telling, rather than to really change the past? Wouldn't this have the same (desired) effect? To alter the subjects future? This would mean the past stays the past, now is now, and the future (or one version of it) is yet unwritten, but is influenced by our perception of (not the reality of) past events. This in no way explains the (instant) AT though. Unless SH is attempting to use his power on us (readers of SS) to alter our memory of what happened ten books ago. And Dan, if SH is just a puppet then the only fun I could have reading about him would be to find the strings. These books have lots of strings, and not many of then go up to Heaven. nastler --- Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <danldo at gmail.com> skrev:

Hey, this is the conceit of Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. David Duffy

Just in the context of SilkHorn & Sev, my Big Hypothesis is really based on Sev's "iterative" world-line, not on any specifically SilkHornian past-changing ability. In the New Sun context, the Sev we know has been constructed by the Hierogrammates or whoever by layering different histories on top of each other (at least two histories, anyway). Or if not layering, then replacing one history by another - but I like the layering image better, partly I guess because you see the same mechanism in Free Live Free. My hypothesis is that SilkHorn astral-travelling to Urth launches a new future Sev world-line, perhaps radically different to the one in New Sun. The instigator of the change is no doubt the Outsider/Increate, intervening with SilkHorn as his agent. Totally making up stories: Perhaps the Increate also finds the eternal Hiero/human reproductive cycle distasteful, and from now on it will be replaced by something different - perhaps no longer a succession of universes, but just one, with a definite end. Etc etc etc. (Why he let things get out of hand in the first place - dunno!)

I also think "layering" is the right term. I don't know whether Wolfe actually believes this or not, but these books seem to suggest something I have long thought possible -- that God is an artist who revises His work as He goes along. The analogy I use is Tolkien writing <b>The Lord of the Rings</b>. When he first got the Hobbits to Bree, they found there an odd, weatherworn Hobbit named "Trotter." Nobody was more surprised than Tolkien when "Trotter" turned out not to be a Hobbit at all, but Aragorn. I suspect that this is something like what it's like to create a world that contains creatures with free will. They come up with stuff you had never expected and you wind up revising the world to fit it better. And sometimes this revision leaves behind artifacts of the earlier versions. (Thus Severian's awareness that there were other versions of him before.)

Yes, that is precisely what I think also -- though, as noted, it could also be argued that the O/I used the Narrator to make Severian what he would become in NS. (Side point: an alternate explanation for the inconsistencies ... one that wouldn't involve wiping out the NS. We know that Severian the Memorious nonetheless suppresses certain things and lies about others. Perhaps there was something in the encounter with the Narrator that he finds very threatening ... perhaps even something that might give him a presentiment of his destiny?) --Dan'l