The Apu-Punchau Eclipse

thalassocrat at nym.hush.com · 12 Jun 2008, 04:03 · from 2008-June.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: thalassocrat at nym.hush.com (thalassocrat at nym.hush.com)
Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 14:03:18 +1000
Subject: (urth) The Apu-Punchau Eclipse
Message-ID: <20080612040319.DA8C615803E at mailserver6.hushmail.com>

On Thu, 12 Jun 2008 13:45:56 +1000 b sharp 
<bsharporflat at hotmail.com> wrote:
> 
>But I still retain a sense I could be right. Something just seems 
>missing if Severian only twice uses his power
>to affect nature in a cataclysmic way.  Nobody, certainly not 
>Severian, seems capable of accurately 
>predicting when, where and how his power will manifest itself from 

>his personal being. He might have his 
>full powers always.  In the afterward, Wolfe notes that a 
>"thoughtful" reader can figure out what caused the
>eclipse. Most seem to take him at his literal word and think about 

>the ship. But I always saw that notation
>as being a bit sarcastic, meaning that very little thought is 
>needed to figure out what large body could be 
>used to cause a solar eclipse. 

It's certainly worth thinking about non-Ship explanations. 

The Apu Punchauan villagers surely think that Sev has done a magic 
dance and chant routine to banish the sun, then bring it back. It'd 
be neat if somehow they were correct. It would also be neat if he 
somehow is responsible for wounding the Old Sun as well as 
bringing/being the New Sun. 

I've mused over whether Sev could have caused the black hole at 
this point, maybe by drawing power from it and causing ummm some 
kind of core collapse or something [waving hands], but I don't see 
anything in the text to make the idea work.

In the narrative you have Sev doing his little charade and dance 
routine, which the people surely see as him doing a magic dance to 
banish the sun, then bring it back.

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