size of erebus, et al.

b sharp · 19 Jun 2008, 13:32 · 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: bsharporflat at hotmail.com (b sharp)
Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2008 09:32:21 -0400
Subject: (urth) FW: size of erebus, et al.
Message-ID: <BAY103-W240180D12425FF2A2B1153D7AA0 at phx.gbl>

>
>
> marc aramini says:
>
>>I always thought the retconned story of Theseus and the novascaputs with the
>>enormous sea ship was indicative of the size of the monsters like abaia. the
>>student's creation must face that enormous sea creature that dyes the ship.
>>Those stories always seemed to reflect both thematically and factually to Severian
>>'s main narative.

Though it is a mangled legend, I agree, keeping in mind that it is a naviscaput= ship
 head monster, the big ship being only the tip of the "iceberg". I always assumed the
 rest of his body extended down to the ocean floor, his "feet" roiling the benthos as
 he walked. Seems plausible his entire size could be somewhat akin to a mountain's.

I also find numerous hints in the text that the coming of the new sun will, in fact, rid
Urth/Ushas of such monstrosities/megatherians. I just found another subtle one during
a recent re-reading:

 In his conversation with Master Ash, Severian is made to understand that the Ascians
 are currently engaged in a desperate, frantic attempt to gain a quick military advantage.
 The reason for the desperate need is left sounding important but unexplained. I think it
 may be that Erebus and Abaia are somehow aware that the autarchy is about to be
 passed on to a likely New Sun bringer and they hope to stop it.
 _________________________________________________________________

_________________________________________________________________
Earn cashback on your purchases with Live Search - the search that pays you back!
http://search.live.com/cashback/?&pkw=form=MIJAAF/publ=HMTGL/crea=earncashback

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