_Urth_: Superflous?

Jack Redelfs · 25 Oct 2006, 20:21 · from 2006-October.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: jackredelfs at gmail.com (Jack Redelfs)
Date: Wed, 25 Oct 2006 14:21:59 -0600
Subject: (urth) _Urth_: Superflous?
Message-ID: <19ee41770610251321m14fe9084r277f9b9ccfd17a7e at mail.gmail.com>

Dan'l:
> I think this is unfair to one of GW's most powerful
> moments. "I took off my boots and threw them into
> the water, so as not to walk shod upon sacred ground."

Oh, it certainly was unfair, I just have a penchant for
irreverence. It's a great scene, and it moved me
immensely the first time I read it, but I guess it's true what
they say: familiarity breeds contempt.

> Have you read _Urth of the New Sun_? It defines rather
> clearly where the power actually came from.

It's been years. The power comes from the White Fountain, I
seem to recall, but I cannot recall whether it is specific to the
Conciliator or not. I'm stil curious about the "Sev-as-aquastor"
angle.

> who, if anyone, besides me finds BotNS more satisfying without the
> fifth volume?

I partly agree with you. It was an excellent book, taken on it's own
merits, but, although I always felt that Severian was the Conciliator
somehow, I found his on-screen turn as the Conciliator to be quite
underwhelming. I just expected more. He carreer as Conciliator
lasted for, 1 day, was it?

Still, I really enjoyed the Hierogrammates, the explication of
Apu-Punchau and the re-enactment of Dr. Talos's play. To sum,
I'd be willing to trade _Urth_ for an extra Latro book, but it's
still Wolfe in top form.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20061025/d244d15a/attachment.htm

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