Short Sun blog review

James Wynn · 23 Sep 2010, 08:58 · 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: crushtv at gmail.com (James Wynn)
Date: Thu, 23 Sep 2010 03:58:51 -0500
Subject: (urth) Short Sun blog review
In-Reply-To: <00dc01cb5aeb$36b46ec0$2ace4a0c@rclackey>
References: <SNT123-W5587D39E7937B08DEB2CF7CF7F0 at phx.gbl>	<4C98FDFC.7090908 at gmail.com>	<004b01cb5a09$51d7e520$64d24a0c@rclackey>	<4C9A1B01.2090003 at gmail.com><4C9A1EB8.2050508 at gmail.com>	<4C9A2469.4030209 at gmail.com><006a01cb5a89$9e42fa00$82d04a0c@rclackey>	<4C9A6537.4010902 at gmail.com>
	<00dc01cb5aeb$36b46ec0$2ace4a0c@rclackey>
Message-ID: <4C9B16CB.3030607 at gmail.com>


> Roy C. Lackey-
> The list of characters in RTTW says Typhon was "the ancient tyrant whose
> personality became PAS". Whatever rehabilitation of character he*may*  have
> undergone in Mainframe as Pas has no bearing on the*fact*  that he was an
> egotistical tyrant when he was scanned and when he conceived, constructed,
> stocked and launched his "message from himself to the universe".

I'm not convinced he was rehabilitated at all. I have heard Wolfe say 
repeatedly that the best villain is someone who falls just short of 
being a hero. I think Pas is Wolfe's alternate take on Typhon. 
Severian's experience with Typhon is one POV. But Severian as The 
Destroyer of Urth was the POV of the sailors on the Time ship.

Another take on Typhon IMO is William Ries. Refer to Gideon Chase's view 
on Evil.

u+16b9
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20100923/386e195d/attachment.htm>

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