01/05/98
09:51
RE>Hello, and a rehash of kimleesoong
2 quoted lines
FunkMonkey wrote:
First I will touch on my ideas of how far in the future Urth is. It has always been my contention that as Ushas had replaced Urth after the cataclysm, Urth had replaced Earth after some terreble cataclysm befell it.
Cataclysm? What cataclysm? :-)
One of the many many things I've always liked about TBOTNS is
that it doesn't follow that well-worn path of "Earth: 500 years after the Great Meteor Storm", or "Earth: 800 years after the Nuclear Deluge", or whatever. We are at a time so remotely far into the future that civilization has just fizzled out, "not with a bang, but with a whimper".
Wolfe confirms this in the The Castle of the Otter, where he talks about Urth being the "do-nothing future", where humanity "stays at home... and waits for the money to run out."
1 quoted line
We are told all in the antechamber are decendents from ONE mythic figure, kimleesoong.
Well, we're told that KLS is the prisoner from whom the family
Jonas questions count their descent. That's not quite the same
thing. The very fact that the discrete group of prisoners who question Jonas can be called a "family" tells us that the inhabitants of the antechamber aren't one homogenous body. If they were all descended from KLS, or even thought they were, wouldn't they all be one family? And notice that Jonas talks about "the original prisoners from whom they are descended", rather than "original prisoner".