What's So Great About Ushas?

David Duffy · 16 Jul 2008, 02:12 · from 2008-July.txt.gz

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From: David.Duffy at qimr.edu.au (David Duffy)
Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2008 12:12:04 +1000 (EST)
Subject: (urth) What's So Great About Ushas?
In-Reply-To: <3e1fa2e90807151812n681e157bt6e77a38ecc01c933 at mail.gmail.com>
References: <BAY103-W1816BD1A424980BA227D44D78C0 at phx.gbl>
	<3e1fa2e90807151812n681e157bt6e77a38ecc01c933 at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0807161150060.2327 at orpheus.qimr.edu.au>

On Tue, 15 Jul 2008, Paul B wrote:

> Hierogrammates are the creation of advanced humans.  A creator's making a
> creation better than itself is questionable, and the Hierogrammates give
> little indication of being better than high-tech humans at any rate.
>
> After all, humans/aliens with advanced powers like time-travel are a common
> enough SF idea.  Usually these advanced, intertemporal interlopers don't get
> special moral privileges.  Just because this particular variety of the trope
> claims to be higher beings akin to angels is no reason to believe it.
>
> Fundamentally I believe they're still the same order of beings, just with
> bells and whistles.
>

No, I think they are a step higher in the hierarchy of the great chain of 
being(s), ie they are of the order of angels/planets/spirits in the 
medieval worldview.  Because they have "advanced powers like time-travel" 
they have escaped conventional causation, and are godlike in that sense. 
I think Wolfe's answer to the paradoxes of FTL/time travel is that you 
have to have god-like mental abilities to keep it all straight.  And as 
such, they are incomprehensible to creatures like us still bound in 
time.  So why do Abaia and Erebus require subjugation of the humans of 
Urth when as Severian says, they could eradicate humankind in a day?

One of the ways I see BotNS is as a dialogue with Frank Herbert in _Dune_ 
and _the God Makers_, Delany's _Empire Star_, and Stapledon's _Star 
Maker_.  The Autarch *is* the K.H. with safe (cf the Vodalarii) access to 
a sort of race memory, the hierogrammates *are* fiddling with the 
evolution from universe to universe both temporally/sequentially and 
simultaneously, if the hero can attain a multiplex viewpoint, the Empire 
can be saved.  And then, even if they aren't the Increate, they still 
can "move in mysterious ways" and invoke exactly the same difficulties as 
we have with the problem of evil etc.

Cheers, David.
-- 
| David Duffy (MBBS PhD)                                         ,-_|\
| email: davidD at qimr.edu.au  ph: INT+61+7+3362-0217 fax: -0101  /     *
| Epidemiology Unit, Queensland Institute of Medical Research   \_,-._/
| 300 Herston Rd, Brisbane, Queensland 4029, Australia  GPG 4D0B994A v

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