# Career of Severian as Conciliator *The Urth list — 3 messages, 3 voices, 25 Oct 2006* > 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. --- ### Dan Rabin *25 Oct 2006, 21:55* > 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-Oakes *25 Oct 2006, 22:30 · follows Dan Rabin* > On 10/25/06, Dan Rabin 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--" ``` 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 Wilson *26 Oct 2006, 04:25 · in reply to Dan'l Danehy-Oakes* > Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote: > On 10/25/06, Dan Rabin 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 > ``` ---