Eclipse question

marc · 02 Oct 1998, 05:38 · from urth-v0019.mbox · original

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: marc at continuumsi.com
Subject: (urth) Eclipse question
Date: 2 Oct 1998 05:38:37
Message-ID: <urth-v0019-0033 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0019/0033.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

OK, the "obvious" guess for what caused Apu-Punchau's eclipse
is the ship.  But, why would Tzadkiel bother to help Severian
in such a situation?  Remember, Severian has already brought
the New Sun, and therefore has already insured the continuation
of the next cycle...  I could understand why Zak, Juturna, the
Green Man, etc. would interfere in Severian's past prior to
Severian's examination, but it seems pointless to interfere
after Severian's role is complete (unless Severian has some
additional destiny after UotNS that Gene Wolfe hasn't written
about yet...  Possibly in a short-sun connection).

In fact, given that Apu-Punchau's people end up killing and
entombing him anyway, and given that he's resurrected by the
coming of the New Sun, the whole eclipse thing seems kind of
pointless.  Unless Apu-Punchau's leadership is itself one of
the driving factors in his people's development that eventually
plays itself out in their future history/evolution to New Sun
times...  Any thoughts?

On an unrelated not, it seems clear that Pas is the avatar of
Typhon/Piaton (unless there are other two-headed all-powerful
monarchs floating around capable of building generation ships).
But Pas seems to be a mostly benevolent figure, at least compared
to Echidna, Scylla, etc...  Whereas, Typhon was clearly a bastard...
Guess you'd have to chalk that one up to programmer's error, heh.

-Marc

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

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