Subject: (urth) Space Museum

From: m.driussi <m.driussi at genie.com>
Date: Mon, 13 Jul 1998 21:28:00 +0000

Dan,

Right, not all the buildings in the Citadel are former ships--just
the towers, and maybe not all of them.  The buildings: the picture
gallery is made of brick, I think; then there are the barracks/city
street-like structures they go by on their way to Echopraxia.

My thoughts on zoetic transport ala Noah's Ark--I had it the other
way around.  Not that the mission never materialized, but rather, it
did: that Earth was denuded of flora and fauna, a fallow desert; that
sometime before Typhon or with Typhon, zoetic transports brought
plants (including the avern) and animals (from alzabo to ylespil)
from all over the galaxy; that having completed this reseeding
mission, at least one transport was abandoned to rest on Urth like
the Ark on Mount A--or wherever legend had it resting.

Re: animal husbandry and beast master rites ("bestiality"?).  You are
right, and among other things it shows how very little Sev knows
about his own lifelong neighbors, the beast handlers and the witches
(who =knows= what the Red Tower is all about).  (We actually know more
about the beast handlers, even though he never met any within the
text--and he met one or two witches!) OTOH, since Wolfe often has
puns come to life in his work, I can't be certain that the beast
marriage isn't really carried out.

=mantis=

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

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From: Michael Straight <straight at email.unc.edu>
Date: Tue, 14 Jul 1998 09:01:44 +0000

> the Ark on Mount A--or wherever legend had it resting.

Speaking of arks, I just recently looked up 'autarchy' wondering what the
difference was between that and 'monarchy' and was surprised to learn that
the original spelling is 'autarky' with connotations of self-sufficiency
coming from the 'ark' bit.

Could the change to an Autarchy from a Monarchy have had something to do
with a movement to make Urth self-sufficient again? (One step of which
would have had to have been the reseeding project you mention.) 

-Rostrum