Silk for calde blog: Wolfe thesis

Gwern Branwen · 21 Sep 2009, 23:26 · from 2009-September.txt.gz

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From: gwern0 at gmail.com (Gwern Branwen)
Date: Mon, 21 Sep 2009 19:26:58 -0400
Subject: (urth) Silk for calde blog: Wolfe thesis
Message-ID: <cbf55b100909211626m16b032f4xbe0cb0c35766a208 at mail.gmail.com>

Saw a relatively new Wolfe blog in my Google Alerts:
http://silk4calde.blogspot.com/

http://silk4calde.blogspot.com/2009/09/its-official-i-have-thesis-topic.html

"After a fruitful meeting with my honours supervisor this afternoon, I
have finally settled on a specific topic for my honours thesis! My
intention was always to write something on religion in Gene Wolfe's
solar cycle (or sun cycle, or Urth cycle... I'm not sure anyone can
agree on what it is called), but I had trouble deciding exactly what
to focus on."

We just call it the Briah cycle around here, don't we?

" I narrowed the possible areas of study down to three topics:
1.The religion of The Book of the Long Sun as a parody of Catholicism.
2.Patera Silk and the role of the priest in science fiction.
3.Patera Silk as messiah figure ? particularly as compared to
Severian, the protagonist of BotNS, who is cruel and malicious, unlike
the truly 'good' character of Silk, but is also explicitly a messiah
figure.
After much deliberation I have settled on the second topic, which
lends itself well to a comparative study with other texts, and also
offers a promising three-chapter breakdown. In brief, I plan to
contend that there are two dominant uses of the priest protagonists in
SF:
1.To affirm the priest's faith / religion and its positive effect
(e.g. the missionary goes to an alien planet, converts its
inhabitants, and brings peace and utopia to all).
2.To debunk the priest's faith and expose it as false (e.g. by having
the priest discover something that has him renounce his faith).
These will provide the topics for the first two chapters of my thesis.
In the third, I will address Wolfe's use of the priest protagonist in
BotLS, which I will put forth as an interesting and unique case."

Seems like a worthwhile thesis, although I wonder whether those 2
priest archetypes are quite so universal - such a categorization would
have difficulty with Frank Herbert, I think.

-- 
gwern

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