Short Sun blog review

James Wynn · 21 Sep 2010, 23:08 · from 2010-September.txt.gz

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From: crushtv at gmail.com (James Wynn)
Date: Tue, 21 Sep 2010 18:08:44 -0500
Subject: (urth) Short Sun blog review
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>> Dan'l -
>> 4. Wolfe thought, "Wouldn't it be cool if the chief god was 
>> Typhon...?" and thus tied the whole thing to tBotNS.
>
> Mo -
> At that point, the answer really could have been "No, maybe it 
> wouldn't actually", imo.
> When, on reading the books, it became apparent, my reaction wasn't 
> that delightful feeling of opening up of possibilities and of 
> ideational space, but more a wary sinking feeling. I was slightly 
> mollified by the clever stuff that turned up on revisiting Urth, but 
> even so I feel it would probably have been more conceptually 
> satisfactory to have kept the worldspaces separate. But is that just 
> me? Do the rest of you feel that it all ties together brilliantly?
>

Given the reoccurring themes of transformation and an autopsy of the 
nature of the human soul, it is useful that one of the Whorl's gods has 
been already been met by the reader in his/her original state. Other 
than that, Pas could have been anyone...unless Silk is a clone of 
someone _else_ referred to in "New Sun" (ahem). In that case, "Long Sun" 
is like "Urth of the New Sun". It offers additional (perhaps vain) helps 
to divine the original story.

Anyway, putting Typhon in the Whorl also gets Wolfe's publishers off his 
back about writing another Urth novel.

u+16b9

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