Book of the New Sun -- Severian's mother

obrien · 26 Mar 1987, 19:46 · 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: obrien at aero2.aero.org
Subject: Book of the New Sun -- Severian's mother
Date: Thu, 26 Mar 87 11:46:35 -0800
Message-ID: <sflovers-v12-118-10 at digest.sf-lovers>
X-Digest-Issue: SF-LOVERS Digest V12 #118
X-Urthmirror-Source: https://archive.org/details/sf-lovers-digest-vol-12a

This is a specialty question for those folks who've read "The
Book of the New Sun" with some degree of care.

   Wolfe claims that he tied up all the loose ends.  Wolfe is also
known for incredible subtleties.  Therefore, I'd like to know if
anyone out there has any clues as to the real identity of Severian's
mother.

   Ouen claims that her name was Catherine, and that she ran away
from a group of monials.  Some time after her tryst with Ouen, the
law took her away, presumably to the Matachin Tower, where the
infant Severian was adopted into the Order.

   The question is, can anyone match this up with any of the other
characters in the book?  Cyriaca, for instance?  Or is it indeed
true that this was some completely new person, never met or referred
to by anyone else?

Mike O'Brien
obrien at aerospace.aero.org

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