What's So Great About Ushas

Roy C. Lackey · 12 Jul 2008, 01:10 · from 2008-July.txt.gz

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From: rclackey at stic.net (Roy C. Lackey)
Date: Fri, 11 Jul 2008 20:10:00 -0500
Subject: (urth) What's So Great About Ushas
Message-ID: <001b01c8e3bc$04614720$b8cc4a0c at rclackey.stic.net>

Paul Borochin quoted and wrote:
>On Fri, Jul 11, 2008 at 4:13 PM, Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <danldo at gmail.com>
>wrote:
>
>>
>> The source of the White Fountain is Severian's mating with Apheta. The
>> H/Ys knew that would happen, and brought Severian to Yesod specifically
>> to do this. Due to their freedom of time, they knew the results of
creating
>> it. Ergo, they bear moral responsibility for its effects.
>>
>
>Really?  I had always had a hard time picturing Severian literally giving
>birth to an astrophysical anomaly by having sex with an alien.  I'd assumed
>it was something he was told or decided for himself since he spent his time
>in Yesod doing Apheta instead of asking some much-warranted questions.

Of course fathering a white hole on an insect is absurd. But so are Time
Corridors, FTL ships, astral travel, aquastors, ghosts, blood-sucking
shape-shifting reptiles that can fly high and fast enough to achieve escape
velocity then travel through vacuum and land on another planet safely,
werewolves, etc., etc., many of which have been used in the Sun Cycle by
Wolfe. You just have to accept it, like vampires in a vampire story.

And you are right, Hieros and Hierogrammates can't be lumped together by one
term; they are as profoundly different as cause and effect, and there ain't
no damn Hieros who actually appear in the Urth Cycle--identified as such,
anyway.

-Roy

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