{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/804",
    "note": "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.",
    "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'"
  },
  "archive": "urth",
  "thread": {
    "id": 804,
    "subject": "TBOTNS in TBOTNS",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "1998-06-15T21:14:06+00:00",
    "last": "1998-06-15T21:14:06+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0014-0009@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "adam louis stephanides",
        "address": "astephan at students.uiuc.edu"
      },
      "date": "1998-06-15T21:14:06+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) TBOTNS in TBOTNS",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "A while ago there was a discussion here taking off from Wolfe's revelation\nin Plan[e]t Engineering that one of the books Severian and Thecla read in\nthe cell was The Book of the New Sun, and asking what the relationship was\nbetween that book and the book we readers hold in our hands.  Having just\nread all five books, I believe I can say that the book Severian and Thecla\nread, Canog's BotNS, is not our BotNS or a version thereof.  In fact,\nCanog's book probably is not a biography of Severian at all, although it \nmay have contained what little Canog knew of the \"Conciliator's\"\nbiography.  Hence the issue of \"why didn't Severian know what was going\nto happen to him?\" doesn't arise.\nIf you like, the relation between our book and Canog's book is like that\nbetween the Gospels in the New Testament and the Gospel of Thomas found at\nNag Hammadi, which is purely a collection of Jesus' sayings with no\nbiographical element at all (by which I don't mean to imply that Severian\nis Christ).\n\nWhy do I say this?  First of all, we know what Severian tells Herena and\nDeclan in his cell, which Canog takes notes of. \"I told them all I knoew\nof the history of the Old Sun's dying, and what that would do to Urth, and\nI promised them that at last someone would bring a New Sun....Declan \nwished to know how Urth would fare when the New Sun came; and I, \nunderstanding little more than he did himself, drew upon Dr. Talos's play\"\n(V, ch. 37).  Severian doesn't say anything about narrating his life\nstory; in fact, when Herena asks him if he's the New Sun he says he \"would\nnot speak of that.\"\n\nThis isn't conclusive; as is shown elsewhere in (our) BotNS, the fact that\nSeverian fails to narrate something doesn't prove that it didn't happen.\nBut there's another piece of evidence.  When Severian is delivering the\nbooks to Thecla, he lists them as \"the smallest,\" \"the brown book,\" \"the\ngreen book,\" and \"the folio volume with arms on its cover.\"  (I, ch. 7)\nThe brown book is the Book of the Wonders of Urth and Sky, of course.  The\ngreen book is described as \"a collection of devotions, full of enameled\npictures of ascetic pantocrators and hypostases...\" (I, ch. 6)  The \"folio\nvolume\" is later described as a \"book of heraldry\" (I, ch. 13).  This\nleaves, by elimination, \"the smallest\" as Canog's BotNS.  But the green\nbook is \"hardly larger than my hand and no thicker than my index finger.\"\n(I, ch. 6)  I submit that a book smaller than that could not be our BotNS.\nFurthermore, the smallest book is later described as a \"book of theology\"\n(I, ch. 13), not a description which fits our BotNS.\n\n(It occurs to me while writing this that I'm not at all clear what are the\nclues, aside from Wolfe's own statement, from which we're supposed to\ndeduce that Canog's BotNS is among the four books.  I've shown that if\nit's any of them, it must be the smallest; but the only specific\ninformation I've found on the contents of this book is that it discusses\n\"those things those who have returned are said to say lie beyond\ndeath...not only the accepted views of the hierophants, but various\neccentric and heretic theories,\" a description which has little relation\nto what we know of Canog's BotNS, or ours.  Presumably this was stuff\nadded to Severian's original discourse either by Canog or whatever\nintermediaries may have come between Canog and the book as Severian and\nThecla read it.)\n\nAs for the question, which was raised in the earlier discussion, of why\nThecla would ask for a book which is lost, I have a theory about that.\nIt's basically off the top of my head, so there may very well be a fact\nI've forgotten which shoots it down, but here goes.\n\nThe book isn't lost, and Thecla knows it isn't lost.  The common people,\nincluding Dr. Talos, have been led to think it lost.  My admittedly\nspeculative reasoning: the New Sun is a sort of a state religion in the\nCommonwealth, since it presents a future Autarch as the savior of the\nworld.  But the BotNS contains the inconvenient information that this\n\"savior\" will in fact wipe out nearly all of Urth's population, so the\nState hides this information by pretending that the book has been lost.\nThe exultants' attitude towards the New Sun is that it's a fairy tale to\nkeep the masses quiet (e. g. Thecla's irreverence), so\nthere's no harm in letting them read the book.  One problem with this\ntheory is that the exultants, who are notoriously disloyal, could use\ntheir knowledge of the BotNS to turn the populace against the Autarch.\nBut this could be gotten around by assuming that even the rebellious\nexultants believe in keeping the common people ignorant on general\nprinciples.\n\nFinally, while writing this post I noticed a paradox I had never noticed\nbefore.  Dr. Talos's play is based on Canog's BotNS, which is based on\nSeverian's discussion of the effects of the New Sun in his cell, which is\nbased, as he himself admits, on little more than Dr. Talos's play!  So how\ndid the play prove so accurate, not to mention prophetic?  Even if we\nassume that Severian's talk was much more biographical than he admits, he\nhadn't experienced the scene with Valeria, Baldanders and the prophetess\nyet; but this scene is predicted by the play.  Either Severian is an\nuncannily accurate unconscious prophet (unlikely since he's so poor as a\nconscious one) or, more likely, either Canog or Dr. Talos had access to\nother esoteric sources of knowledge.\n\n--Adam"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}