Subject: What is _Urth of the New Sun_ about?

From: Mike Ward <m at d.w>
Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2003 03:04:19 +0000

What is _Urth of the New Sun_ about?

I've read it and _Book of the New Sun_.  I remember the story of _Book of 
the New Sun_ pretty well.  But I don't remember a single thing about 
_Urth_.  Well I recall a few vague things about him being on a space ship 
at the begining, but otherwise I'm drawing a blank.

Somebody jog my memory, please.

Mike

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From: AnomJ7t7 <anomj7t7 at aol.com>
Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2003 03:59:53 +0000

>What is _Urth of the New Sun_ about?                                          
                           It's been awhile since I read it,but it seems to me
an underlying theme was that Severian was supposed to be procuring some sort of
nuclear device from an alien race that would 'restart' the sun which,of course
a million years into the "Urth's" future, was dying.

---

From: AnomJ7t7 <anomj7t7 at aol.com>
Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2003 04:29:49 +0000

And just another brief aside...I'm not overly well read in the science fiction
genre,but it doesn't seem to me that this was ever a really popular theme
(dying sun or million years into the future type stories) alternate histories,
near future dystopias and space operas are a dime a dozen, but I suppose this
sort of sub-genre (if it really can be called that) would require quite a bit
more imagination and ability to pull off.The only books I can think of in this
genre are 'the Night land' by William Hope Hodgson (God-awful and damn near
unreadable after chapter 10 or so....some of the ideas are amazing though,given
it's pre WWI) Jack Vance's 'Dying Earth' series, Wolfe's "Book of the new sun"
series and of course 'the Time machine' by H.G.Wells. Anyone know of any other
examples?

---

From: Mark Jeffcoat <jeffcoat at alumni.rice.edu>
Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2003 11:30:02 +0000

anomj7t7 at aol.com (AnomJ7t7) writes:

> an underlying theme was that Severian was supposed to 
> be procuring some sort of nuclear device from an alien 
> race that would 'restart' the sun which,of course

My summary may contain spoilers. As the original post suggests,
though, this is not necessarily a plot-oriented sort of book.

Severian becomes Autarch in _The Book of the New Sun_. The old
sun of the world he rules is dying. In _Urth_, Severian travels
to meet an alien being who will test him. If he passes the test,
Severian will return with/as the New Sun (a white hole dropped
into the old sun's center, to rejuvenate it with new matter). If
he fails, there will be penalties.

The first part of the book takes place as the space (kinda)-ship 
is traveling: Severian has adventures, meets aliens, learns stuff,
etc. This part is weird.

Then Severian reaches the heaven-ish kind of place. Wolfe draws
a lot on a cosmology I usually think of as cabalistic (q.v. the
"Tree of Life"), though I have no idea where this structure
comes from originally. This part is weirder.

Severian brings the New Sun. Yay! ... But we're only about
half way though the book. Severian's Grand Journey Through Time
is next. You'll forgive me if I don't even try to recount any part
of the plot here, 'cause not only do things get even weirder 
and ridiculously complicated, but Wolfe also shows us scenes from
earlier books through new eyes (and possibly in new versions of
the universe), forcing us to re-interpret ... pretty much everything.
This project will expand to fill any time you give to it, but
you have to enjoy that sort of game.

Any questions? Too bad. I'm pretty much out of answers. 

-- 
Mark Jeffcoat
Austin, TX

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From: James Nicoll <jdnicoll at panix.com>
Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2003 15:38:43 +0000

>(dying sun or million years into the future type stories)

	Dying sun scenarios have the problem that while it was a reasonable
scenario when Wells was writing [and Verne would toss in cooling of the
Earth's interior, which he felt was going to be Very Bad Indeed for us]
the current model suggests that the sun will continue to get brighter 
until it cooks Earth and only much later end up as a cooling white dwarf.

	OTOH, at some point all the stars will run out of material to
fuse and the universe will become rather dark. I know Stephen Baxter has
played with that scenario. Part of _Darwinia_ is set after things have
cooled off a bit, although only a little as far as the POV characters 
are concerned.
-- 
	"The Union Nationale has brought [Quebec] to the edge of an abyss.
With Social Credit you will take one step forward."

						Camil Samson

---

From: Mike Ward <m at d.w>
Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2003 15:54:09 +0000

> And just another brief aside...I'm not overly well read in the science
> fiction genre,but it doesn't seem to me that this was ever a really
> popular theme (dying sun or million years into the future type
> stories) alternate histories, near future dystopias and space operas
> are a dime a dozen, but I suppose this sort of sub-genre (if it really
> can be called that) would require quite a bit more imagination and
> ability to pull off.The only books I can think of in this genre are
> 'the Night land' by William Hope Hodgson (God-awful and damn near 
> unreadable after chapter 10 or so....some of the ideas are amazing
> though,given it's pre WWI) Jack Vance's 'Dying Earth' series, Wolfe's
> "Book of the new sun" series and of course 'the Time machine' by
> H.G.Wells. Anyone know of any other examples?

Edmund Hamilton's _City at World's End_ is about a modern city thrown so 
far into to future that the earth is starting to cool.  They find ruined 
domed cities that had relied on geo-thermal energy until the earth itself 
had cooled then apparently they had left the earth.

The classic Superman story "Superman Under the Red Sun" also by Hamilton I 
beleive has Superman trapped on earth in the far future where the sun has 
turned red which elmimates Superman's powers.  All the people have long 
since migrated into space, and only androids and strange new creatures 
which have evolved to live in the new environment remain on earth.

Mike

---

From: Mike Ward <m at d.w>
Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2003 15:57:27 +0000

Mark Jeffcoat <jeffcoat at alumni.rice.edu> wrote in

> he fails, there will be penalties.

Okay that's the stuff I sort of remembered and its becoming clearer now.

> is traveling: Severian has adventures, meets aliens, learns stuff,

Yeah.  I mentioned have fuzzy memories about him on the space ship.  I 
think it's the fact that it was weird that makes my memories so fuzzy.

> you have to enjoy that sort of game.

That helps a little. I think part of my problem is that because he goes 
back to events from the BotNS that I confuse the events of the two books.

Mike

---

From: AnomJ7t7 <anomj7t7 at aol.com>
Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2003 19:23:26 +0000

>Earth's interior, which he felt was going to be Very Bad Indeed for us]

Yes,if I'm not mistaken,Wells and Hodgson were working from Lord Kelvin's
theories on the sun's age.

>until it cooks Earth and only much later end up as a cooling white dwarf.

Thank you for mentioning this,because it reminds me of a book which I had on my
'To Read' pile quite a few years ago that I ended up forgetting about and
losing in the shuffle,and that's Brian Aldiss's 'Long afternoon of
earth'.Although I never read it it seems to me that it was about a future
period (not sure exactly how many years) where the sun is expanding and the
tropical greenhouse like environment as well as the strangely evolved life
forms it creates.I'll have to look for this book again.

Back to the original subject....That in turn reminds me how that in 'The book
of the new sun' Severian would always refer to the "Great jungles of the north"
or something similiar....did Wolfe ever give a scientific explanation for this
reversal of the Urth's environmental make-up or was it something I missed?

---

From: Michael S. Schiffer <mschiffe at condor.depaul.edu>
Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2003 19:26:38 +0000

>...
> Back to the original subject....That in turn reminds me how that
> in 'The book of the new sun' Severian would always refer to the
> "Great jungles of the north" or something similiar....did Wolfe
> ever give a scientific explanation for this reversal of the
> Urth's environmental make-up or was it something I missed? 

Severian lived in the Southern Hemisphere.  (South America, 
specifically, from clues in the text that I don't currently 
remember.)

Mike

-- 
Michael S. Schiffer, LHN, FCS

---

From: Mike Ward <m at d.w>
Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2003 20:34:23 +0000

> 
> Back to the original subject....That in turn reminds me how that in
> 'The book of the new sun' Severian would always refer to the "Great
> jungles of the north" or something similiar....did Wolfe ever give a
> scientific explanation for this reversal of the Urth's environmental
> make-up or was it something I missed? 

I think it was because BotNS was set so far in the future that the earth 
had just changed that much.

Mike

---

From: LugoMan <rodak at space.com>
Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2003 21:39:01 +0000

> specifically, from clues in the text that I don't currently

I remember one passage talked about the southern lands being made up of
individual islands while the north is one large continent. I guess I always
took it to be the eastern hemisphere. The southern lands being Indonesia,
Philippines, New Zealand and Australia* and the north being Asia (wasn't the
enemy called ascians? Their system of government was kind of a take off on
communism). I don't know enough geology to know if the above mentioned land
massed are drifting north or south so I don't know what the globe will look
like thousands of years from now.

Just now thinking about it I am tempted to reread the whole series and
imagine Severien with an Australian accent. It will probably completely
change the whole tone of the book.

---

From: Matt Austern <austern at well.com>
Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2003 00:37:09 +0000

> had just changed that much.

Simpler explanation: most of the action of the book is south of the
equator.  There are lots of places in the world today where you'd go
north to find jungles.  Why not in the distant future, too?  (If
you'd like, you can assume a bit of continental drift so that most of
the big land masses are in the southern hemisphere.)

---

From: Jim Cambias <cambias at spahmtrap.heliograph.com>
Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2003 20:38:28 +0000

> like thousands of years from now.
Book of the New Sun takes place in a somewhat altered South America.  The
enemy come from what we would call Central America, as their name Ascians
means "no shadow" people -- i.e. the sun shines straight down where they
live.  

Cambias

---

From: Steve Simmons <scs at lokkur.dexter.mi.us>
Date: Fri, 02 Jan 2004 14:41:10 +0000

> Severian lived in the Southern Hemisphere . . .

Well south of the Equator, too.

> (South America, specifically, from clues in the text that I don't
> currently remember.)

There were a number of references to the pampas, but given Wolfe's
tendency (in BoTNS, anyway) to reuse words for new meaning, that probably
doesn't mean much.  I got the impression that there had been major
re-arrangements of the continents, not dissimilar to what happens
near the end of EoTNS.

Note also that the timescales are often over-estimated by readers,
not to mention Severian.

---

From: Ron Henry <ronhenry at blahblahblah.clarityconnectcom>
Date: Tue, 06 Jan 2004 16:35:24 +0000

> like thousands of years from now.

No, really, It's pretty clear from references in both the New Sun and
Long Sun series that Severian and the people of the Whorl who come from
the same Commonwealth as Severian, were South Americans. (One off the
cuff reference I can think of is that they drink mat�.)

As far as the time-scale of the sun "dying", theories of solar evolution
(I know I'm gesturing at another part of this thread, sorry) are
irrelevent, as it's implied in several places that the sun was
deliberately damaged or poisoned at some point. Best estimates I've seen
put the action tens of thousands of years in the future, not millions or
billions.

There's a huge amount discussion of all this in the archives of the Urth
mailing list, which you should be able to Google without much trouble if
you feel motivated to spend a month or two reading them (they go back
many years).

Ron Henry

---

From: jack starr <*****@***.***>
Date: Wed, 07 Jan 2004 03:00:53 +0000

On Tue, 6 Jan 2004 11:35:24 -0500, "Ron Henry"
<ronhenry at blahblahblah.clarityconnectcom> wrote:
>cuff reference I can think of is that they drink maté.)
>

Shit, I dink mate and live in New Jersey

---

From: William December Starr <wdstarr at panix.com>
Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2004 20:58:15 +0000

In article <bteo4e$30n$1 at news01.cit.cornell.edu>,
"Ron Henry" <ronhenry at blahblahblah.clarityconnectcom> said:

> No, really, It's pretty clear from references in both the New Sun
> and Long Sun series that Severian and the people of the Whorl who
> come from the same Commonwealth as Severian, were South Americans.
> (One off the cuff reference I can think of is that they drink
> mat�.)

How likely is it, though, that the equation "they drink mate' in that
culture" == "that culture is located in South America" is going to
remain continuously true for tens of thousands of years?

---

From: Ron Henry <ronhenry at blahblahblah.clarityconnectcom>
Date: Tue, 20 Jan 2004 14:35:50 +0000

> remain continuously true for tens of thousands of years?

Well, as I've written before, I don't think the time BotNS/BotLS take
place is nearly as distant as most people suppose. Most of what happens
in the book is pretty recognizable and comprehensible to us, and
suggests at most a couple thousand years have passed, at most.

Honestly, I think this is one of the subtle Wolfean trickeries at
work -- it appears because of some tricks he is playing with sfnal
tropes -- like the dying sun, which a close reading reveals was
deliberately damaged, not fading from age, or a landscape seemingly more
altered, even tectonically, from our own (Severian might just be
confused with directions on occasion) -- to be much more remote from the
contemporary reader than it really is. Wolfe might also be teasing with
or satirizing some of these sfnal tropes -- it really doesn't take tens
or hundreds of thousands of years to spread urban blight down (or up) a
river valley, or to carve up the faces of mountains into monuments, as
20th-c. American history shows us pretty plainly. Most of the "lost
advanced tech" in the story is hardly "far future" (unless one accepts
now-naive "Golden Age" sf ideas of what the "far future" will be
like) -- hover cars, ray guns, neural torture devices, rocket ships as
big as buildings, whatever viral technique does the memory transfers,
etc.

That's how I read it anyhow. I'm sure milage will vary!

Ron

---

From: Nancy Lebovitz <nancy at unix5.netaxs.com>
Date: Wed, 21 Jan 2004 08:49:35 +0000

In article <bujec7$jba$1 at news01.cit.cornell.edu>,
>20th-c. American history shows us pretty plainly. Most of the "lost

What about the beach where all the "sand" is actually broken glass?

-- 
   Nancy Lebovitz    nancy at netaxs.com  www.nancybuttons.com  
                       Now, with bumper stickers

Using your turn signal is not "giving information to the enemy"

---

From: wthyde <wthyde at godzilla.acpub.duke.edu>
Date: Fri, 23 Jan 2004 22:25:55 +0000

> > maté.)

        Incredibly unlikely.

        Today we might say that the English are known for drinking
        tea and port.  Three hundred years ago they drank neither.
        Three hundred years ago they drank beer for breakfast.
        Few now do.

        Also, Wolfe explicitly tells us that he is using some
        English words to describe objects/concepts that do
        not exist today.  Just because they are said to be
        drinking "mat\'e" doesn't mean they are actually doing
        so.

        We might as well claim they are Armenian, because of
        Severian's name.

William Hyde
EOS Department
Duke University

---

From: wthyde <wthyde at godzilla.acpub.duke.edu>
Date: Fri, 23 Jan 2004 22:33:43 +0000

"Ron Henry" <ronhenry at blahblahblah.clarityconnectcom> writes:
> place is nearly as distant as most people suppose.

        Even a thousand years is too many for the mate reference.

 Most of what happens
> suggests at most a couple thousand years have passed, at most.

        Having just read  the books I have to disagree.  The strata
        shown in "Sword of the Lictor" are not going to be laid
        down in less than hundreds of thousands of years.  As they
        have since been uplifted, more time must be added for that.

        Nor do I think the geography fits.  There is no river
        equivalent to Gyoll today, nor would there be even if
        sea level were to drop due to polar glaciation.

        It's either the very far future, or not our Earth.

> deliberately damaged, not fading from age,

        Actually that's pretty obvious.  And even at the time
        Wolfe wrote the book most of his audience would be
        aware that the sun grows brighter with age, not dimmer.

William Hyde
EOS Department
Duke University