Appian

Tony Ellis · 29 Aug 2006, 23:01 · from 2006-August.txt.gz

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From: tonyellis69 at btopenworld.com (Tony Ellis)
Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2006 00:01:16 +0100
Subject: (urth) Appian
Message-ID: <000001c6cbbf$082ee180$6401a8c0@cthulhu>

Rex wrote:
>Using figures from the story Roy calculates
>Lomer's age to be 96, and I can see no mistakes in his math. So do
>you too contend Lomer is 96? (Ditto for fellow prisoner Nicarete, who
>seems "almost equally old"?) And can this actually be right given
>conditions in the antechamber, where the prisoner's diet seems to
>consist of coffee and sweet rolls, and they're frequently roughed up by
>malicious exultant punks? Or is it more likely that Wolfe screwed up
his
>numbers? Obviously, I think the latter more probable. 

I don't think it matters. Maybe Wolfe thinks that 96 is a plausible age
for Lomer, and maybe he never stopped to think how old he was forcing
Lomer to be. Either way, 62 years remains the figure that The Cat gives
us for the gap between Appian's rule and the start of Severian's, and
it's as much a part of that story as the name Appian itself.

As a personal aside: I don't tend to think of TBotNS as a realistic
novel in the conventional sense. I don't find Severian stumbling across
a 96-year-old man in an ancient Waiting Room any more implausible than
the Waiting Room itself. Later, he finds another old man in a little
house in the absolute middle of nowhere, and he turns out to be a
schoolmate of Fechin. (And how old would *he* have to be?)

>This was a shameless cheap shot on my part and I apologize.
Very nice of you to say so. Think nothing of it.

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