Subject: (urth) Re: Hello, and a rehash of k

From: Tony Ellis <tony.ellis at futurenet.co.uk>
Date: Fri, 01 May 1998 14:12:51 +0000

[Posted from URTH, a mailing list about Gene Wolfe's New Sun and other works]

01/05/98
                                                                      09:51
 RE>Hello, and a rehash of kimleesoong

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."

>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".

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/