Career of Severian as Conciliator

The Urth list — 3 messages, 3 voices, 25 Oct 2006
https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/4755

Dan Rabin25 Oct 2006, 21:55
2 quoted lines
At 2:21 PM -0600 10/25/06, Jack Redelfs wrote: I found his on-screen turn as the Conciliator to be quite underwhelming. I just expected more. He carreer as Conciliator lasted for, 1 day, was it?
I don't think the narrative of The Urth of the New Sun covers all appearances of Severian as the Conciliator: 1. I recall a couple of references in The Book of the New Sun (spoken by ?Typhon, ?Agia) to the Conciliator having disappeared and reappeared. 2. In Urth, Severian wonders how many of the guests at the inn where he fights the zombie are him. At the time of his writing in Ushas, at least, he seems to assume either that he's going to do a lot more walking in the Corridors of Time, or that more replicas will be constructed in different threads of the tapestry of time. ...and I just noticed a Wolfean inversion between Book of the and Urth of the: In Citadel, Severian becomes the Autarch, "who in one body is a thousand" (ch. 27); whereas in Urth his one person is dispersed into a succession of bodies. Could we have the opinions of our knowledgeable Christian contributors on how these two details might reflect religious themes? -- Dan Rabin
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes25 Oct 2006, 22:30

↳ follows, by subject match Dan Rabin

2 quoted lines
On 10/25/06, Dan Rabin <wolfe-lists at danrabin.com> wrote: Could we have the opinions of our knowledgeable Christian contributors on how these two details might reflect religious themes?
Well, the first thing that comes to my mind is the 'miracle of bilocation,' whereby various Catholic saints have been known to appear in two or more places at the same time. (The first example I can think of is is Padre Pio.) Also, Jesus was known to mysteriously disappear from amongst crowds and show up somewhere else. You've also made me to wonder whether Wolfe, or you, were making a slight Heinlein reference:
1 quoted line
2. In Urth, Severian wonders how many of the guests at the inn where he fights the zombie are him.
Somehow this made me think of RAH's time-travel classic, "All You Zombies--"
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes, writer, trainer, bon vivant ----- http://www.livejournal.com/users/sturgeonslawyer http://www.danehyoakes.com Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die. - Mel Brooks
Jeff Wilson26 Oct 2006, 04:25

↳ in reply to Dan'l Danehy-Oakes

12 quoted lines · 1–2 deep
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote: On 10/25/06, Dan Rabin <wolfe-lists at danrabin.com> wrote:
Could we have the opinions of our knowledgeable Christian contributors on how these two details might reflect religious themes?
Well, the first thing that comes to my mind is the 'miracle of bilocation,' whereby various Catholic saints have been known to appear in two or more places at the same time. (The first example I can think of is is Padre Pio.) Also, Jesus was known to mysteriously disappear from amongst crowds and show up somewhere else. You've also made me to wonder whether Wolfe, or you, were making a slight Heinlein reference:
2. In Urth, Severian wonders how many of the guests at the inn where he fights the zombie are him.
Somehow this made me think of RAH's time-travel classic, "All You Zombies--"
There's never more than two of the protagonist at once in "Zombies", and "By His Bootstraps" only gets up to three. The earliest mention of mass time duplicates I've found so far was a Poul Anderson short.
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com < http://www.io.com/~jwilson >

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.