Urth Net

← back to the conversation

Severian and the corridor of time.

Jeff Wilson · 04 Aug 2010, 01:09 · from 2010-August.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: jwilson at io.com (Jeff Wilson)
Date: Tue, 3 Aug 2010 20:09:46 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: (urth) Severian and the corridor of time.
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTimhY_eeejpMQM9ip-f_LA=OLzN9zVokP0CiX2y8 at mail.gmail.com>
References: <AANLkTimhY_eeejpMQM9ip-f_LA=OLzN9zVokP0CiX2y8 at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <d6aad8dc9f8212e482df56d33af0e1c4.squirrel at webmail.prismnet.com>

> Is the corridor of time outside of time/space and only needs the power
> from
> the New Sun to access it

We don't know for sure. The business about moving in a direction not seen
before suggests that movement om  higher spatial dimension is involved.
The power of the New Sun may not be needed in general, but it may be that
*Severian* needs the power of the White Fountain to achieve that movement.
All the other folks that travel the Corridors seem to do it in ways that
are light-related in some way (mirrors, reflective sails) or the travelers
themselves are light-related (the Green Man, the Hierdules presumably make
both the time-spanning saucers, the White Fountain, and the sun of Yesod),
except for Juturna, which is why I think she is secretly related to
Severian.

> but then he should be able to travel to anytime
> he
> wants, even before the new sun was created.
> I am just looking at someone else's input on this.

Once in the Corridors, he may be able to travel any distance on either
Fountain-power or human muscle power, and then step down into the normal
world of four dimensions. But without the White Fountain or a similar
power source to draw on, he can't go back up to the Corridors. It may be
that he decides to write URTH at all because with the White Fountain
contained, concealed, or even consumed by the new sun, he is stuck in the
early time centuries of Ushas , and is making the best of his forced
retirement from saviorhood.


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