What's So Great About Ushas?

thalassocrat at nym.hush.com · 15 Jun 2008, 06:25 · from 2008-June.txt.gz

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From: thalassocrat at nym.hush.com (thalassocrat at nym.hush.com)
Date: Sun, 15 Jun 2008 16:25:58 +1000
Subject: (urth) What's So Great About Ushas?
Message-ID: <20080615062600.162721A003A at mailserver8.hushmail.com>

On Sun, 15 Jun 2008 15:21:34 +1000 "Roy C. Lackey" 
<rclackey at stic.net> wrote:
>
>Without the Conciliator, there would have been no Claw, no order 
>of
>Pelerines to guard it. If no Pelerines, what was the monastic 
>order
>Catherine ran away from that led to her imprisonment by the Guild, 

>which led
>to both Severians having been born into their clutches in the 
>first place?

Maybe I'm missing your point, but surely you have that problem 
however you think of Sev1? Unless you believe that he became the 
Conciliator too, which I can't see at all.

On the other hand, I don't think it's too much to imagine a 
parallel to the Pelerines, based on something other than the New 
Sun religion.

>
>The biggest problem I have with this theory is that it violates 
>the
>integrity of the Urth Cycle as a stand-alone work, and it turns 
>the sense of
>it upside-down in doing so. It also dooms Urth to the ice-future, 
>the
>"do-nothing" future that Wolfe has disparaged.

On the first point, I don't agree. Even taking BOTNS alone, without 
UOTNS, I think we are at least invited to imagine that maybe it's 
not going to be all beer and skittles when the New Sun arrives. 

Perhaps the biggest hint: Sev himself, a torturer with no hint of 
Christ-liness apart from his recapitulation of parts of Jesus' 
life: what kind of salvation can we expect from him? The inversion 
is there, hidden if at all by its obviousness.

Also, the cosmology propounded by aquastor-Malrubius - what is 
remotely attractive about it? Dt Talos' play. The hints in the 
stories of Gabriel and the small angel and Gabriel versus the cock, 
that perhaps the shadowy higher beings are not connected to the 
Increate. 

The most creepy sign: Sav praying at the Pelerines' altar, but in 
the end praying only to himself. By the end of UOTNS we know that 
Sev is the Conciliator. Put the two together and you have at least 
a broad hint that there's nothing very holy going on here.

I think that Wolfe intended this to be a "horror story" from the 
start, but even if I'm wrong he at least allowed plenty of scope 
for ambivalence.

On the second point, I take Wolfe as referring to Urth society as 
depicted in UOTNS, dwindling on a resource-depleted world. But in 
the larger context, this is not the condition of humanity as a 
whole - it's already spread, it's not degenerating on Urth. It 
doesn't need Urth reborn to save humanity from the ice death.

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