Subject: (whorl) New Sun/Long Sun/Short Sun as whole (RTTW spoilers)

From: Adam Stephanides <adamsteph at earthlink.net>
Date: Tue, 20 Feb 2001 08:21:33 +0000

I intend to respond on the "TBOTSS as fantasy" issue, but a line in your
post suggeste a question to me which, to my knowledge hasn't been addressed
yet.

on 2/18/01 11:23 PM, William Ansley at wansley at warwick.net wrote:

> I can't say you are not right, because I don't know what was going on
> in Wolfe's mind, But, if you are right, I think Wolfe did a grave
> disservice to his readers and has made it impossible to seriously
> consider NS/UNS/LS/SS as a cohesive whole, which is surely what he
> wants; else why did he link the books so strongly?

If we do consider all twelve books as a whole, one enormous (apparent)
contradiction leaps into view.  A while ago on the urth list, in (IIRC) a
discussion of the morality or otherwise of the destruction of Urth, the
point was made that one reason Urth had to be punished was Typhon's plans to
colonize the galaxy, which would spread humanity's warlike nature across
hundreds of planets.  But at the end of RTTW we see Silk, who has been
presented as the moral center of the Long Sun and Short Sun books, going off
to help do just that.  Does this mean that Silk is unknowingly planning to
devote the rest of his life to an evil cause?  (Come to think of it, from
this point of view it would have been better if everyone had stayed on board
the Whorl.)  Or is space colonization not so bad after all?

--Adam

P. S.  I didn't post this to the urth list because I wasn't sure that was
correct netiquette; but if somebody else wanted to I wouldn't object.

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