book of the new sun questions

Stuart Hamm · 06 Apr 2007, 13:27 · from 2007-April.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: hammstu at sbcglobal.net (Stuart Hamm)
Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2007 06:27:10 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: (urth) book of the new sun questions
In-Reply-To: <8476d0320704031702m48579306o2a35cb01827280ec at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <40950.27839.qm at web81402.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

What about Borski's theory that the "New Sun" is a trick to get the people of Urth to believe in this Myth and willingly give themselves and their planet up not for their own good, but for that  of the aliens??

Bruce Hayles <brucehayles at gmail.com> wrote:  I thought that the overarching goal was to create better intelligences
(though what is better is not clear to me). Severian is asked if he
ever thought there was something more than good and evil, and Apheta
talks about a war against entropy. The way I view this is, they will
bring a sun to race if they believe that the potential of the race to
become something better (a divinity, whatever) justifies the cost of
creating a new sun and taking it there. They also work across time to
make a race worthy of a new sun; it seems that even though they are
judging whether or not a race is worth a new sun, that at the same
time they are always trying to make the race worthy of it, for
example, by helping Baldanders with the hope that he will die and his
knowledge will spread, or by their interactions with Severian.

About entropy: the thing I think they are getting at is creation of
intelligence on a local scale (for example, by evolution), creates a
great deal of information and uses little energy. By making greater
intelligences, they are fighting a war against entropy by creating the
potential for more information on a local scale. It isn't as simple as
"greater intelligences" though, because Baldanders is certainly more
intelligent than Severian but is inhuman, and his path is cast as not
desirable. It seems that there is a criteria beyond intelligence,
also, because the quest for power and conquering stars is cast as
undesirable as well. The path that Typhon would follow is not
desirable. The only thing I can conclude from this is that the real
goal is some sort of balance between chaos and order. The total
control that a tyrant like Typhon brings to many worlds by conquering
them limits information content by resulting in homogeneity. Pure
intelligence that seeks only to extend its own life (Baldanders) can
be viewed as limited at least in the sense that if there was a world
full of people like Baldanders, perhaps the stories that they generate
by existing would be less interesting than the stories of normal
humans. Similarly, a world full of animals might be seen (the
zoanthrops or something) as undesirable because the social
organization of animals is limited, and so the stories we can tell
about them without anthropomorphizing are limited. What this view says
for humanity's ascension to divinity, I am not sure. I would guess
that humanity has the potential to be something like hierodules, going
across time and trying to create the potential for better stories.

On 4/3/07, Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:
> Bruce,
>
> I think the first thing to consider is that the Hierodules may have
> more than one reason for interacting with humans. Bringing the
> New Sun is their goal; but who says that it's their *only* goal?
>
> On 4/3/07, Bruce Hayles 
wrote:
> > Urth will only receive a new sun if its epitome is found worthy. Is it
> > necessary that the epitome of Urth is always an autarch (and a
> > thousand man in a single body), or could Typhon (if he was willing)
> > act as an epitome? Was the autarchy created by hierodules to produce a
> > line of autarchs to be tried in Yesod, and also hold the Commonwealth
> > stagnant while they were produced? (The last autarch has the
> > conviction that humanity will return the stars as a divinity or not at
> > all)
> >
> > The coming of the New Sun results in the destruction of most of the
> > Urth, but brings new resources and the New Sun, and a fresh start for
> > humanity. Is the idea behind this that the epitome (if judged worthy)
> > is proof that human kind can produce something worthwhile, and so
> > should get a chance at reconstruction? Why will Urth, now with its new
> > sun, progress any differently than it did with the old sun? Is it any
> > more likely that humanity will go to the stars as a divinity now, as
> > opposed to going to the stars and conquering worlds (like it did
> > before)? Since all culture and technology was lost, and humanity is
> > starting over again, I do not see how it is any more likely. Is it
> > just another roll of the die then?
> >
> > If the hierodules are behind the autarchy, why do they still do things
> > like support Baldanders expressly so he can grow fat with knowledge
> > and die, dispersing his knowledge to others? How could Baldanders
> > death possibly affect the line of autarchs? Additionally, since the
> > last autarch's conviction is that the Commonwealth stagnant while the
> > line of autarch's march on and face trial at Yesod, why would any
> > effort be wasted on spreading knowledge? The idea behind the
> > hierodules sharing knowledge is that it somehow improves those they
> > share it with, or others indirectly. Ultimately, the hope is to
> > produce from humanity something close to divinity. If the hierodules
> > are still working for that with the old sun, what does that mean?
> > _______________________________________________
> > Urth Mailing List
> > To post, write urth at urth.net
> > Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
> >
>
>
> --
> Dan'l Danehy-Oakes, writer, trainer, bon vivant
> -----
> http://www.livejournal.com/users/sturgeonslawyer
> http://www.danehyoakes.com
> Soon, where Toon Town once stood will be a string of gas stations,
> inexpensive motels, restaurants that serve rapidly prepared food. Tire
> salons, automobile dealerships and wonderful, wonderful billboards
> reaching as far as the eye can see. My God, it'll be beautiful.
> _______________________________________________
> Urth Mailing List
> To post, write urth at urth.net
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>
_______________________________________________
Urth Mailing List
To post, write urth at urth.net
Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net

Stuart Hamm 
1235B 7th Ave 
San Francisco, CA 94122 
415 786 3624
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20070406/21e2ecf8/attachment.htm

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