Time and the New Sun

Matt Austern · 07 Oct 1992, 17:53 · from sf-lovers.1992.mbox

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From: matt at physics2.berkeley.edu (Matt Austern)
Subject: Re: Time and the New Sun
Date: 7 Oct 92 17:53:52 GMT
Message-ID: <sflovers-v17-522-15 at digest.sf-lovers>
X-Digest-Issue: SF-LOVERS Digest V17 #522
X-Urthmirror-Source: https://archive.org/details/sf-lovers-digest-vol-17b

dani at netcom.com (Dani Zweig) writes:
> Trying a simpler question, as a means of getting a handle on the harder
> one, how much time passed between Ymar's day and Severian's?  The clues
> conflict.  Ymar lived in the first days of the dying of the sun, in the
> last days of Earth's diastrophism, and in the last days of Earth's
> interstellar empire.  (It may have even been in his day that the Autarchy
> lost most of Earth outside South America.)  On the other hand, he lived
> in a world little different from Severian's, where even the small
> villages were the same.

There's another clue worth paying attention to: the way that Ymar is
remembered in Severian's day.  Severian read one story about Ymar, and felt
that he was reading about a person infinitely removed from the world he
lived in, about whom it was possible to know almost nothing.  The
impression I got is that almost no records about Ymar, or writings of his,
had survived, only a few fragments like the one Severian read.

The way that Ymar was remembered seemed more similar to the way that we
remember Alexander the Great than to the way that we remember Napolean.

Matthew Austern
(510) 644-2618 
austern at lbl.bitnet

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