Gene Wolfe: Another New Sun question

Curt Wiederhoeft · 23 Jun 1994, 20:58 · from sf-lovers.1994.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: curtw at euler.jsc.nasa.gov (Curt Wiederhoeft)
Subject: Gene Wolfe: Another New Sun question
Date: 23 Jun 94 20:58:45 GMT
Message-ID: <sflovers-v19-516-1 at digest.sf-lovers>
X-Digest-Issue: SF-LOVERS Digest V19 #516
X-Urthmirror-Source: https://archive.org/details/sf-lovers-digest-vol-19b

OK.  Here goes.  After volunteering to help Mark Andersen with his planned
_Book of the New Sun_ FAQ, I thought the least I could do is re-read the
series and make sure that I haven't missed any of the mysteries mentioned
on the net in the last few years.

SPOILERS HO!

I think I've now got a pretty thorough understanding of the tetrology, but
before going back to _Urth_ again, I have one nagging question concerning
the characters of Jonas and "Miles."  To refresh your memory, Jonas is (at
the time Severian meets him) a cyborg, trying to become "whole" again.  It
is implied that Jonas' organic parts are foreign (although Severian doesn't
manage to catch on to this at all.)  Eventually, he leaves Urth through
Father Inire's mirrors.

In the opening of _Citadel_, Severian revives a dead soldier who retains no
memories.  Severian names him "Miles," but later makes the following
statements:

   I *don't* know who you are-but in another sense I
   think I may.  I think you're two people, and that
   I know one of them.
        ...
   He told me he would come back.  He said, 'I will
   come back for her when I have been repaired, when I
   am sane and whole.'  I didn't know quite what to
   think when he said that, but now I believe he has
   come.

Now my question: Is Severian's interpretation correct?  It seems to me just
as likely that with all of the time travel going on in the series, it might
just be the case that a dead Miles provided the raw materials for Jonas'
"patch job," and that Severian has it completely backwards.

Any enlightened folk out there?  I'm going to be starting up on _Urth of
the New Sun_ tomorrow, and I don't recall this sub-plot coming up the first
time I read it. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Curt
curtw at euler.jsc.nasa.gov

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