Planet of the Inhumi

Jeff Wilson · 22 Sep 2010, 03:11 · from 2010-September.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, 21 Sep 2010 22:11:55 -0500
Subject: (urth) Planet of the Inhumi
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTik2soGh5-47t_zHiP=zoihDCpuACPJHm6LMq2TD at mail.gmail.com>
References: <SNT123-W23C0F2CF129C25BC76C686CF7F0 at phx.gbl>
	<AANLkTik2soGh5-47t_zHiP=zoihDCpuACPJHm6LMq2TD at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <4C9973FB.40505 at io.com>

On 9/21/2010 11:40 AM, Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:
> Lee,
>
> The Whorl is at leasdt 300 years old internally -- it is at least a
> thousand years old in sidereal time. And Typhon is not "still alive"
> when Severian meets him; he is either dead or in some sort of
> suspended animation. Severian's presence revives him.

Typhon/Piaton would be the beneficiary of the natural mummifying process 
of the Andes' higher elevations, that have preserved so many Incan 
bodies and lesser remains for us to find. His pause in reference to this 
may be because of the negative associations with the primitive native 
people, or out of vain revulsion at what his ruler face must have looked 
like in that state.

Typhon's age is a puzzle. He must have been fairly old for some organs 
to be beyond repair with the impressive technologies still available on 
Urth, but my suggestion that he looks like a conventional octagenarian 
turned out to have little support. Typhon's sub-venerable cosmetic age 
might be due to just that: cosmetic treatments, though as I recall it 
has often been the style among Hellenic and Roman era dictatorships to 
emphasize the late middle age of the ruler in coinage and statuary as a 
symbol of wisdom and stability.

I wonder if the question of time frames might be addressed by tarting up 
my old PLANET OF THE APES hypothesis with a reverse plot-twist: Instead 
of Green and Blue being Lune and Ushas, maybe the conventionally driven 
Whorl was intended as some kind of round-trip sleeper mission for the 
benefit of Typhon's plans for the Urth, but the Outsider/the Yesodis 
redirected it to Blue and Green instead, so that it serves the 
Increate's purpose as a mission mission to the Inhumi and the Neighbors.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
Computational Intelligence Laboratory - Texas A&M Texarkana
< http://www.tamut.edu/CIL >

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