The significance of Apu Punchau

David Stockhoff · 29 Dec 2008, 23:50 · 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: dstockhoff at verizon.net (David Stockhoff)
Date: Mon, 29 Dec 2008 18:50:15 -0500
Subject: (urth) The significance of Apu Punchau
In-Reply-To: <mailman.1.1230502153.6461.urth-urth.net at lists.urth.net>
References: <mailman.1.1230502153.6461.urth-urth.net at lists.urth.net>
Message-ID: <49596237.7000701 at verizon.net>

Of course, Urth could just as well be in our past as future. It could just as well be in both as in either.

And if Christ is ever to "return" and fulfill god's promise after the Flood, it could just as well be in our future as in Severian's, at this level of abstraction.

************************************

Wolfe himself has since said that Urth is an earlier cycle than our 
>Earth, but I think that may be retroactive continuity after realizing 
>that drowning Urth would otherwise break the OT God's promise to never 
>again destroy the Earth by water.
>(Presumably Robert and Marie's bible contains a slightly different 
>account of Noah's covenant.)
>Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com

Witz wrote:

Interesting point Jeff, it seems perhaps a bit disingenuous of Wolfe's part, given the translator's notes in BotNS, which is signed by Wolfe. It says the manuscript is from the future.  Which means it's the manuscript he tossed into the winds of time in Urth, no?
Interviews and author's exegesis are great, but I will always priviledge the words written in the volume under consideration, especially where there are contradictions.  I think you're probably right about the retroactive continuity with the OT.  Wolfe had a vertiginous "Whoops, what did I do there?" moment.  Either way it works, I'm fine with the idea that Urth was Earth, or that Earth was Urth a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

---
avast! Antivirus: Outbound message clean.
Virus Database (VPS): 081229-0, 12/29/2008
Tested on: 12/29/2008 6:50:16 PM
avast! - copyright (c) 1988-2008 ALWIL Software.
http://www.avast.com

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