Subject: (urth) Career of Severian as Conciliator

From: Dan Rabin <wolfe-lists at danrabin.com>
Date: Wed, 25 Oct 2006 21:55:35 +0000

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

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From: Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <danldo at gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 25 Oct 2006 22:30:52 +0000

> 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:
> 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

---

From: Jeff Wilson <jwilson at io.com>
Date: Thu, 26 Oct 2006 04:25:37 +0000

> Somehow this made me think of RAH's time-travel classic,

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 >