Future Echoes: Hut in the Jungle +

David Duffy · 20 Mar 2009, 21:57 · from 2009-March.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: David.Duffy at qimr.edu.au (David Duffy)
Date: Sat, 21 Mar 2009 07:57:55 +1000 (EST)
Subject: (urth) Future Echoes: Hut in the Jungle +
In-Reply-To: <93d4039f0903200954r1cd8272j2f765b8ae676e706 at mail.gmail.com>
References: <W6763720110209521237567738@webmail42>
	<93d4039f0903200954r1cd8272j2f765b8ae676e706 at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0903210736230.21320 at orpheus.qimr.edu.au>

On Fri, 20 Mar 2009, John Watkins wrote:

> Dorcas thinks that the Claw works by reversing time.  I've always thought
> that that was wrong-headed--that it just works because it's divine
> power--magic.
>

My thinking on this matter, which noone ever seems to agree with ;)
(though perhaps it is too obvious), is that BotNS is a dialogue with
several concepts of Frank Herbert's.  So, the Autarch accesses the
memories of his predecessors after using a drug a la _Dune_, and humans can
ascend to godlike powers a la _The Godmakers_ by being able to channel
phenomena from any time at a given physical location.  IIRC, the example in
that book is the newly deified hero can easily destroy a object because there is always a 
history of superheated plasma for any location in the universe.

So, the superpowers are limited by previous and I guess future events
at the given locus, so he can find out of season hyacinths at a lake,
and reanimate someone who was alive at some time, but only if they were
alive at that place the godling is operating from.  Severian's
failures occur because there hasn't been an appropriate history to revert
to eg the psychopathic woman in the oubliette.

Cheers, David Duffy.

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