The Mystery of Malrubius's Ghost, SOLVED!
The Whorl list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 29 Mar 2001
https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/whorl/1306

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.

==============================================================================

William Ansley — 29 Mar 2001, 23:00

I thought I would take the liberty of assembling the appropriate 
portions of the relevant posts.

> At 7:53 PM +0000 2/6/01, Ian Smith wrote:
> and another from cephelothorax:
> 
> "Persnickety: Are we really meant to believe that
>  Severian, who writes about Master Ash, and the Green
> Man, and being a white fountain hundreds of years
> before he's born is going to consider "Horn" too much
> of a stretch for his readers to believe because he's
> got the love-vibe and walks through walls?"
> 
> On this I'm no more certain, but I got the distinct impression that the
> apprentice Severian was under the impression that Horn / Silk's spirit  was
> actually Malrubius' ghost (hence his comment to Gurloes about Oreb), which
> of course does get mentioned frequently throughout TBOTNS( & he certainly
> pairs Malrubius with Triskele a fair bit).  Whether Wolfe has managed the
> phenomenal task of tying the ends up, we won't know until someone has the
> energy to re-read TBOTNS looking for them.  Surely such a thing is
> impossible, but I'm trying not to make the mistake of under-estimating
> Wolfe...

> At 1:35 PM +0000 2/9/01, Spectacled Bear wrote:
> At 07:30 2001-02-09 EST, BMeyer7 at aol.com wrote:

> ...

...

> 3. Are we to believe that Horn/Silk is Malrubius?
> 
> <<<<
> It's an interesting idea, and quite plausible.

> At 6:39 PM -0500 3/29/01, BraveSaintCroix at aol.com wrote:
>     Whoo-pee, I finally feel like I have something worthwhile to contribute
> to this group- unless, of course, someone beats me to it.  I got the April
> catalogue of the Science Fiction Book Club today, and it has a one-page
> article/advertisement for the Book of the Short Sun.  Of course, as is the
> way of the SFBC, it makes the book sound terribly pulp-sci-fi-ish.  (. . .
> the inhumi, blood drinking aliens who take human form. . . )  It even seems
> to give away quiet a bit.  The last paragraph reads: "As his inability to
> find Silk weights heavily on his mind, Horn if further tormented by the fact
> that his new body bears a striking resemblance to the lost Calde.  In the
> end, he will have to answer a troubling question: has he truly failed in his
> sworn task, or has he become the very man he sought?"
>     I'm not complaining though, because it also includes a "note from the
> author".  Gene Wolfe writes:  "At the end of the 18th Century, serious
> scientists denied that stones could fall from the sky.  At the end of this
> one, very few still insist that phenomena incapable of proof are beyond the
> realm of possibility.  We may doubt telepathy, ghost, and precognition-
> indeed, we should doubt them.  But we cannot rule them out altogether.  That
> phenomenon most often called astral projection plays a part in these books. 
> (So does space travel, which most adults derided as utterly impossible not so
> long ago.)"  And here's what really got me: "Accept it for the sake of the
> story, and you may learn the identity of Master Malrubius's ghost."  (My
> emphasis.)  Wow.  That makes my head spin.  I didn't even think of that, and
> if I remember, no one on here has discussed it much.  Who then, was Master
> Malrubius's ghost?

Apparently the the astral projection of Hornsilk was.

Well, well. Congratulations, Ian. Confirmation from the horse's mouth.

Gene Wolfe seems to have at least a mild case of Asimov's syndrome. I 
hope he recovers before his next book.

William Ansley

*This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------