House Absolute

Jeff Wilson · 01 Dec 2008, 20:47 · from 2008-December.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: jwilson at io.com (Jeff Wilson)
Date: Mon, 01 Dec 2008 14:47:35 -0600
Subject: (urth) House Absolute
In-Reply-To: <39ed084f0812011235i508edd58i2774cde4e2550aa8 at mail.gmail.com>
References: <63FB9AC7E0AEC7459DBCC99DC44247CA01F6AFEA at BOSIDEXDB.Bankofscotland.ie>	<1f7617370812010914s45d78b69tbd86043d2c2ecf20 at mail.gmail.com>	<49344246.3010607 at io.com>
	<39ed084f0812011235i508edd58i2774cde4e2550aa8 at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <49344D67.7050006 at io.com>

Matthew Groves wrote:
> Again, this is the mistake of reading Wolfe as hard-sf.  Wolfe's future 
> doesn't have to be consistent with scientific theories of geology or 
> plate tectonics.  When he wants to connect his world to images of the 
> present or past, he does so with recognizable architecture; when he 
> wants to show the great age of Urth, he shows us the effects of erosion 
> and sedimentation and subduction kneading the ruins our world into 
> unrecognizability or oblivion.  Nessus is Buenos Aires.  Nessus is 
> Byzantium.  Incan ruins are still standing, but the technology of the 
> fare future is found as if fossilized.  That's the logic of Urth.  
> Wolfe's Urth is a rhizome of associations and allusions to thousands of 
> years of history and literature.  It's consistency lies in the coherent 
> structure of that rhizome, not in scientific plausibility.
> 
> Therefore, if the elapsed time between our present and Severians is a 
> pertinent detail, then the clues to it will be found among the nodes of 
> that rhizome.  The Lexicon Urthus 2nd ed. has some interesting things to 
> say about this under "History of Urth."  (BTW, can someone tell me what 
> the abbreviations P.S. and S.R. mean in this book?)

They relate to the reckoning of time in years, which you've just said is 
a mistake, so I won't burden you with this spurious notation.

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

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