Thecla's fourth book

Roy C. Lackey · 01 Oct 2006, 19:26 · from 2006-October.txt.gz

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From: rclackey at stic.net (Roy C. Lackey)
Date: Sun, 1 Oct 2006 14:26:49 -0500
Subject: (urth) Thecla's fourth book
Message-ID: <000c01c6e58f$8fb314c0$b33ec6d8 at rclackey.stic.net>

JBJordan quoted and wrote:
>>One place where this is evident is the last line of CITADEL. Severian,
just
>>before leaving Urth for Yesod, wrote that he was writing in what would be
>>"the last year of the old sun." That turned out not to be true. For
whatever
>>reason, in URTH Wolfe made life go on on Urth for another forty years
before
>>the coming of the New Sun and the flood.
>
>I've been way too busy to keep up here, but I did catch this. If it
>is really 40 years, then Wolfe has a basis in the New Testament. The
>Old Creation ended in AD 30, at Pentecost, but did not fully end
>until the Cataclysm (Flood, the Bible does call it that) in AD 70
>with the destruction of Jerusalem, centre of the Olde Order. There is
>a two-stage ending, for a variety of reasons into which I need not
>go. Suffice to say that Wolfe may have had something like this in
>mind, or might call on it if you pressed him !! :-[ Severian (type of
>Jesus) made king in "30" and world ends fully in "70".

Well, Severian was writing ten years after he became autarch. So the gap
between his becoming "king" and the "Cataclysm" was actually fifty years for
those who remained on Urth. I guess you could get around that by saying that
he didn't really become "king" when he became autarch; rather, he became
"king" when he decided to go to Yesod as Urth's Epitome.

-Roy

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