Severian's skin color

Roy C. Lackey · 24 Jun 2005, 13:10 · 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: Fri Jun 24 13:10:36 2005
Subject: (urth) Severian's skin color
Message-ID: <000c01c578f8$c64413e0$1a3ec6d8 at rclackey.stic.net>

Crush wrote:
>Well, I consider it self-evident that Typhon's scan occurred after he got
his
>new body, since Pas has two heads. I don't have my books, but I seem to
>recall a suggestion that Typhon had *just* got Piaton's body when he met
>the Conciliator. That would place the Whorl's launch just before or very
soon
>after his confrontation with the Concilliator. In that case, the scan must
have
>occurred as the capstone to the Whorl project before launching. Since I say
>the taking of Piaton's body was punishment for his taking part in the
rebellion
>with his siblings and mother, there is the very real possibility that
Typhon had
>himself rescanned with this new body after executing his family. Would
Typhon
>have permitted his rebellious family to be a worshiped pantheon on the
Whorl
>after they had betrayed him? Well, look how their are depicted and you tell
me.
>Pas and Kypris depicted naturalistically. The rest of his family are
monsters.
>Typhon might have had himself scanned again simply because he wanted Pas to
>be knowledgible of his family's potential treachery.

I've pointed this out before, though it keeps being ignored -- perhaps
because it plays hell with all sorts of beloved theories, but the textual
fact of the matter is that Typhon's children were exactly that -- little
children -- at the time they were scanned for the _Whorl_. Cilinia (Scylla),
Echidna's firstborn, was close to the age of puberty:

"I saw the bird was really a girl old enough to take care of other sprats
but not old enough to get married." "[. . .] a big girl that would be a
woman in another year." (RTTW, 347)

And:

"'I died young. It can't have been long after I was scanned for the
_Whorl_.'" (392)

Her siblings were all younger; the youngest could not have been much more
than six years old when scanned. The idea that seven little kids took part
in any meaningful way in a conspiracy against their father is laughable on
the face of it, for the same reason I laugh when I see one of our kittens in
mock-attack mode take a swipe at one of our old toms.

I don't know if it's possible for a computer persona to "grow up" over the
years, and grievances arise, but if it happened to Typhon's children, it
happened on the _Whorl_, not Urth. The rebellion against the father can have
taken place only on the _Whorl_, not Urth, in so far as the textually-given
insurrection influenced events in the LS and SS books. The ship was gone
before the children even grew up.

As for the notion that Piaton was/is Typhon's son . . . my blood pressure is
much too high as it is. A moment's reflection on the above textual facts
should suffice to show that it couldn't have happened as Crush theorized.
And if that's not enough, just read chapter XXV of SWORD, where it tells how
and why Piaton was chosen. Piaton was a slave chosen, after testing, for his
physical strength. That's all there was to it.

-Roy

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