What's So Great About Ushas

Jeff Wilson · 11 Jul 2008, 19:49 · from 2008-July.txt.gz

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From: jwilson at io.com (Jeff Wilson)
Date: Fri, 11 Jul 2008 14:49:57 -0500
Subject: (urth) What's So Great About Ushas
In-Reply-To: <3e1fa2e90807111231l67cb2c37r4eec5f34aa0b8d2c at mail.gmail.com>
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Message-ID: <4877B965.2050709 at io.com>

Paul B wrote:
> 
> 
> On Fri, Jul 11, 2008 at 3:21 PM, Jeff Wilson <jwilson at io.com 
> <mailto:jwilson at io.com>> wrote:
> 
>     I move that we adopt my term "Yesodis" to mean the current and
>     former inhabitants of Yesod during the period of the Book and their
>     non-human servants, including the Hierodules, Hierogrammates, and
>     Hieros. It's certainly easier to spell and shorter.
> 
> 
> This term isn't terribly good because it confounds the human Hieros with 
> the alien Hierogrammates, as well as confounding the present with the 
> past. 

By confounding do you perhaps mean "compounding" or "conflating"? That's 
what "Yesodis" is intended to do, to refer to all of these higher beings 
as a group, and this is useful because they seem to share a cause in 
their existence. It can also mean the relevant subset of them in 
context, the way "Axis Forces" means the Germany, Japan, etc in WWII, 
but not necessarily all of them every time.

> 
> I bet God didn't put a black hole in Urth's sun either.  It's pretty 
> likely he had little to do with the white hole, too.  The personal power 
> Severian holds in these matters seems to be uncertain at best, no?  How 
> did you get the conclusion that he's responsible for the white hole not 
> striking Urth?  Or directing it at all, for that matter.

He draws on its power numerous times, and I don't think "draw" is purely 
metaphorical. And if he's not there at the end to bring the New Sun for 
Ushas, why is he there at all?

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
< http://www.io.com/~jwilson >

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