Urth of the New Sun

ames!lll-tis!ptsfa!pbhyc!djo · 27 Nov 1987, 23:31 · from sf-lovers.1987.mbox

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: ames!lll-tis!ptsfa!pbhyc!djo at ucbvax.berkeley.edu
Subject: Re: Urth of the New Sun
Date: 27 Nov 87 23:31:44 GMT
Message-ID: <sflovers-v12-516-4 at digest.sf-lovers>
X-Digest-Issue: SF-LOVERS Digest V12 #516
X-Urthmirror-Source: https://archive.org/details/sf-lovers-digest-vol-12b

kjm at dg-rtp.UUCP (Not That One!) writes:
>  _Urth_ begins immediately after _The Book_ ends: Severian the
>Torturer, Autarch of Urth, Examplar of Man, has boarded the ship
>that will take him far from Urth to face judgement

Uhhh...I suppose this is *technically* correct, since at the end of
tBotNS Severian says he is writing immediately before boarding the
ship...but what is not mentioned in tBotNS, and is mentioned only in
oblique references in tUotNS, is the decade Severian has spent as
Autarch.  The *action* of tUotNS, thus, begins long after the
*action* of tBotNS ended.

>A great deal of _Urth_ is concerned with making more plain the
>unravelling of mysteries established in the first

This is, for many, the biggest complaint with tUotNS; most of us
liked the vague, implied feel of those "mysteries" -- the answers
were always there, if you could figure them out; but now the puzzle
has been taken away.

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net