{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/whorl/581",
    "note": "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.",
    "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'"
  },
  "archive": "whorl",
  "thread": {
    "id": 581,
    "subject": "Clockwork Universe",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "1998-12-12T11:59:03+00:00",
    "last": "1998-12-12T11:59:03+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<whorl-v0009-0061@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Alice Turner",
        "address": "al at interport.net"
      },
      "date": "1998-12-12T11:59:03+00:00",
      "subject": "(whorl) Clockwork Universe",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Re Jonathan's clockwork query:\n\nThe idea of the \"mechanical (or clockwork) universe\" dates back as far as\nthe 14th c,  but became really influential in the just pre-Enlightened late\n17th, early 18thcs, with their enormous advances in optics and clock\nmanufacture, and followed Gallileo's discoveries at the same time as\nGarden-of-Eden theory (what we now call fundamentalism wrt creation).\nDescartes was a big proponent, Spinoza a skeptic. In it, all phenomena are\nthe result of matter set in motion according to natural laws set down by\nGod. Note, natural as opposed to supernatural, which had been the prevailing\nview for all of recorded history to date. There were political Reformist\nramifications: Protestant predestinationism favored it, obviously. But what\ndoomed it was, first, the successive discoveries of just how huge and\npuzzling the universe really is, and second, the theory of evolution. I'm\nsimplifying alarmingly, of course.\n\nSo Wolfe is playing with the idea of the Whorl really and truly being a\nmini-universe created down to the last iota not only by Typhon but by\nhimself, Wolfe. If Silk is a clockwork figure up until the time of his\ntheophany, that event precipitates him into the uncharted area of free will\n(Wolfe is a converted Catholic [Eliot, too], the most tenacious kind) or,\nthough he is perhaps following the will of the Outsider, actions that he\nwould never in the course of an ordered life consider. I think that might\nhelp to answer your question of how to reconcile the Outsider's position. He\nwill not provide supernatural help, but he has put into play a potent form\nof natural help (Silk) that may yet fail--free will. There is also the\nwriter's inside joke of, well, no matter how carefully he has built his\nuniverse and plotted his action---characters sometimes do have a will of\ntheir own. The theophany is at the very beginning of the series, after all.\n\n-alga\n\n\n\n\n*This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun."
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}