Severian's skin color

Roy C. Lackey · 23 Jun 2005, 00:57 · from 2005-June.txt.gz

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: rclackey at stic.net (Roy C. Lackey)
Date: Thu Jun 23 00:57:28 2005
Subject: (urth) Severian's skin color
Message-ID: <001201c577c9$3242d620$133ec6d8 at rclackey.stic.net>

Crush wrote:
>If Roy Lackey and Blattid are correct in their posts that Silk is a clone
>of Typhon, then he would carry Typhon's very face back to the Whorl
>to meet Severian. As appealing as that would be to me. I don't believe it.

I think you must have meant "carry Typhon's very face back to _Urth_". In
any event, I never claimed that Silk was a clone of Typhon, as the
previously referenced post and others from the same time period indicate. I
argued against it.

>Wolfe has said (when asked about Silk's "ancestry"), that Silk is the son
of the
>Calde and his mistress. The question was regarding his *ancestry*, not his
>parentage. I resolved this quandray by asserting that Tussah was Typhon's
>clone, and that Silk is a clone of the son of Typhon and Kypris' original
("the
>son not of my body shall be Calde after me").

To assert that Tussah was a clone of Typhon is an unnecessary plot
complication for which there is no textual support. It is enough that the
old Calde was Silk's spiritual, adoptive father who designated his 'son' as
the heir to his office.

> Thus, Tussah and Pas are
>murdered about the same time and Silk rises to take both their places.
>And that's why Silk meets 2 pairs of parents during his death: Pas,
>Kypris, Tussah, and his aknowledged mother.
>
>For a lot of reasons, I would still like to say that Silk's "original" was
a clone of
>Typhon emplanted in proto-Kypris. But the text suggests that Chenille
looked
>*very* much like Tussah and Horn told Silk that he and Chenille didn't
"really
>look that much alike." There's no way around it for me. Silk is genetically
the
>bio-child of Typhon and proto-Kypris.

Let's see -- "Silk is a clone of the son of Typhon and Kypris' original".
So, Typhon fathered a son on his mistress, and Silk is a clone of that son?
Did Typhon father that child before or after he lost his body? Did the male
half of the genetic material come from the original Typhon or from Piaton?
And who was that son? Why isn't he in the pantheon? Why isn't he in the
books?

And Kypris had the hots for a clone of her own son, and the clone
reciprocated. Tisk, tisk.

Earlier, Crush wrote:
>I believe Horn is a clone of Typhon. There, I said it.

I'd like to see the textual basis for that claim. You have, genetically
speaking, Typhon = Tussah = balding Horn. And no one noticed. Not Quetzal,
who knew the latter two. Not Hammerstone, who had seen both Typhon and Horn.
Not Marble or Kypris, who had seen all three. And it seems to have escaped
the notice of _everyone_ how much Horn looked like Chenille.

Typhon was proud of his face. He had 'command presence'. Horn had trouble
ruling his own family.

-Roy

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