Severians Later Appearance (Spoilers)

brunians at brunians.org · 19 Jan 2010, 07:28 · from 2010-January.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: brunians at brunians.org (brunians at brunians.org)
Date: Tue, 19 Jan 2010 02:28:23 -0500 (EST)
Subject: (urth) Severians Later Appearance (Spoilers)
In-Reply-To: <EDBEAD2A37844DD2992ABCF6992ABE8C@eMachinePC>
References: <1bf4dd41001161124g47e457b2p58aeebcff7d55ba7 at mail.gmail.com><11031.67.142.130.15.1263672798.squirrel at brunians.org>
	<140757.72425.qm at web37605.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
	<EDBEAD2A37844DD2992ABCF6992ABE8C@eMachinePC>
Message-ID: <6985.67.142.130.48.1263886103.squirrel at brunians.org>

BTW, James, you are exactly right that Wolfe said something indeterminate
and that I assumed some on top of that. I still *think* I am correct in
thinking that Hyacinth is genetically female, but I no longer believe that
Wolfe confirmed that.

Should I meet him again I shall ask him in more detail.

.

>> Not to bring up the old "authorial fallacy" here, but if he wrote
>>the books in such a way that they support the "male chem/once
>>male" possibility in a way that doesn't contradict it and in fact
>>makes it a compelling possibility, it doesn't matter what he said
>>after the fact.
>
> Yeah, but (for me) puzzling over Wolfe's stories is interesting because I
> believe there is a "right" answer. I don't think it matters to the basic
> plot of the story whether Hyacinth is a male chem or not (my old theory,
> not
> yours). Nor whether Incus is a woman or Tussah and Horn are a clones of
> Typhon.  These details only matter because we think they mattered to the
> author. When I decided that I would never be able to prove important
> details
> about An Evil Guest to *my own* satisfaction, I lost interesting in trying
> to find the answers. But I still like the universe Wolfe imagined.
>
> However, I suppose it is cheating to for Josh to declare the
> "transgendered"
> theory is dead because of a reaction that he *inferred* from Wolfe's
> response. Especially since his reaction was to *my* theory about Hy being
> a
> male chem (my attempt to pull all of --what I understood to be-- the loose
> threads together into one neat little explanation). I mean, the problem as
> I
> see it is that Josh doesn't need to counter with any evidence. He just
> says,
> "I heard Wolfe say something indeterminant and I divined this and that."
>
> It reminds me of *some* of the resistance I faced on this list when I
> posited the "male chem" theory. One person said that Wolfe would never
> have
> a "moral exemplar" character involved in a homosexual relationship...even
> though a relationship with a transgendered male chem would not be
> homosexual
> or heterosexual since their sexes are strictly formal (or at least I
> thought
> so at the time). Nor would a man having sex with a "female" robot be any
> more or less perverse than doing it with a so-called "male" robot. And
> Wolfe
> did have a character have sex with a robot in "Counting Cats In Zanzibar".
> Anyway, it's frustrating to face that kind of resistance. At least, Josh's
> response was better than that. He made a serious attempt to check it out.
>
> Still, "Hy is a transgendered male chem" is a pretty wild theory. But I
> didn't walked away from it because of Josh's report.  I continued to roll
> it
> around in my mind with other theories for a long time like Captain Queeg
> and
> his ball bearings (it was fun) until I decided I had latched onto one that
> was solid enough to make all the others irrelevant.  The thing is, I know
> that Gene misdirects about his stories all the time. He seems to enjoy
> dropping hints that don't mean what we often think they do. I remember
> when
> Marc Aramini reported that Wolfe had told him [in response to his "Blue
> Ushas" theory] "No, Urth is Green!". Then a short time later, Wolfe
> reportedly just sighed and said "I should just keep my mouth shut". Some
> people still like the Blue Ushas theory, even though Marc (last I heard)
> had
> discarded it because of what Wolfe told him. I don't think Urth is Green
> nor
> that the Short Sun is Sol even though I toyed for a good while after that
> with Blue being Verthandi (I even scoured a map of Mars looking for a
> mountain range that might qualify as Lizard Island).
>
>> I mean,
>> any book that requires the author to explain it or to
>>verify things beyond the covers of the book seems
>>like a failed book.
>
> I would be the one most likely to agree with this in most cases, yet I
> don't
> in the case of Wolfe's novels. For example, consider Auk kidnapping
> Hyacinth. There's no way we would know emphatically why he had done that
> and
> why he let her go if Wolfe had not explained it. I had four or five
> possible
> explanations in mind for Tussah's prediction "The son not of my body shall
> be Calde after me." But it took an answer to a question posed to Wolfe for
> me to settle on one. Still, I find this 7 volume novel to be one of
> Wolfe's
> most satisfying.  If Wolfe had not confirmed that Dorcas was Severian's
> grandmother, it would still be a highly controversial theory. Does that
> make
> The Book of the New Sun a failed work?
>
> And in many cases the questions thought to be unresolvable merely haven't
> been considered with enough intensity. Many people seem to find the basic
> plot of "Peace" (How did everyone die? What's the deal with the guy
> slamming
> oranges against the big metal doors? etc?) to be inscrutable. But it was
> clear to me, the first time I read it--after I thought about it a few
> days.
>
> Regards,
>
> James,
> The Absolute Lord of Unpopular Theories
>
> _______________________________________________
> Urth Mailing List
> To post, write urth at urth.net
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>

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