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From: Dan Parmenter <dan at lec.com>
Subject: Wolfe's politics
It's hard for me to imagine Wolfe as entirely "anti-PC"; after all, I think that 5HC is essentially a critique of colonialism.
Wolfe attacking PC doesn't surprise me at all, given his frequent populist and anti-academic remarks.
(Which rouse a certain irritation in me, I confess. Despite
his sneers at academic critics, it's Wolfe, even more than James Joyce who coined the phrase, who requires "an ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia," as this list demonstrates.)
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From: CRCulver at aol.com
Subject: Re: (urth) New Sun miscellany
[Me]:
<5) My final question is one that probably only Wolfe can answer, though the answer may be in some interview. We know that Urth of the New Sun was not part of Wolfe's original intention, but was written as a compromise with his editor. And Urth makes explicit a number of matters highly relevant to BotNS, but which are much more obscure there, and would often probably have gone unsuspected without Urth. My question is twofold: In doing the final revisions of BotNS, did Wolfe have the eventual existence of Urth in mind? In other words, would these matters that are made explicit in Urth have been equally explicit in BotNS, had Wolfe gained his first preference and not written Urth?
Okay, this one I should have known. In CoD p. 417 (the same passage which told me Wolfe had not originally planned to write Urth), Wolfe describes his compromise with David Hartwell as follows: "David would publish The Citadel of the Autarch exactly as I had written it, provided that I would write another book in which Severian recounted his trip to the universe next door." [emphasis added] In other words, Wolfe's own plan had been to publish the four volumes of BotNS, as we have them, and nothing else (setting aside BotLS, BotSS, and the various Urth-related short stories).
What this means is that either such major plot elements as Severian's "trial" being no trial, his predecessor's trial being a put-up job, and Severian himself being the Conciliator were not part of Wolfe's original scheme, or he intended them to remain entirely unguessed-at. As someone who would like to believe that the mysteries of Wolfe's fiction must eventually yield to careful reading, I find this a dispiriting reflection.
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[Me]: And to what
extent can we assume that Wolfe's vision of the New Sun universe is the same in Urth as it was in BotNS?>
[Christopher R. Culver]:
It is certain there are some things in the BotNS that would make no sense and have no observable purpose if Wolfe didn't already have some elements of UotNS planned. The first thing that springs to mind is the winged Tzadkiel in the Autarch's book.
To be sure, Wolfe must have had much of what is in Urth plotted out as background when he wrote BotNS (this doesn't mean, as I say above, that he intended to let us in on it). But can we assume that he didn't change his mind about any of it between completing BotNS and writing Urth?
--Adam