Ascians' Thematic Purppose

Jeffrey Lefstin · 31 Jan 2006, 00:02 · from 2006-January.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: jeff.lefstin at stanfordalumni.org (Jeffrey Lefstin)
Date: Mon, 30 Jan 2006 16:02:31 -0800
Subject: (urth) Ascians' Thematic Purppose
Message-ID: <3944bd9e9f28a022ee864dc4feaf61ae at stanfordalumni.org>

On whether "Ascian" is supposed to invoke "Asian":

While no doubt Wolfe's ideas of a totalitarian state were influenced by 
Maoist China and North Korea, I have always wondered what to make of 
the fact that the Ascians seem to come from NORTH AMERICA.

The Commonwealth, as I am sure has been discussed before, seems 
unquestionably placed in South America.  The Ascians come from the 
continent to the north beyond the equator ("the waist of the world.).  
Barring some serious continental drift, that puts them right here in 
the good old U.S. of A!

Besides, there are explicit Asian references in several parts of the 
book (see discussion in Lexicon Urthus) so implying one seems 
superfluous.  Didn't Wolfe claim a classical origin for the word 
Ascian?

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