note Re: Short Sun blog

Lee Berman · 29 Sep 2010, 11:58 · 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: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee Berman)
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2010 07:58:59 -0400
Subject: (urth) note Re: Short Sun blog
Message-ID: <SNT123-W555D2A473AB2A9B034642FCF670 at phx.gbl>

>Roy C. Lackey: Dorcas is the one who came up with the theory that Sev's powers 
>involved turning back time to a point before the injury or illness occurred. 
>That theory is disproved by Sev's refashioning of Herena's withered arm into a 
>normal arm. Her withered arm was a birth defect; there had never been a time when 
>the arm had been normal. That power, and the power to bring the dead
>back to life, was a supernatural power.

Severian's power seems to express itself differently at different times. There is 
Herena. Then there is the assassin we see pass backwards through the stages of 
mummification and putrefaction on his/her path to resurrection. We have the Apu 
Punchau resurrection also to consider.

There is Severian himself whose (as I assume) self-resurrection on the Sanguinary 
Field left him with a scar on his chest. Scar for Jonas also, I think.  These seem 
like an incorportation of biological processes using forward and backward time shifts. 
Fie on the divine, supernatural power that relies on tissue fibrosis and maggots for 
healing and resurrection.

(p.s. don't dis my girl Dorcas ;- ) )

>I don't think either Juturna or Tzadkiel wore spacesuits when they swam in the cold 
>vacuum of space.

Neither did Severian or any of the sailors or jibers on the deck of the Ship. I don't
see the suggestion that the necklaces of air are directly manufactured by the Increate
or supernatural in any way (though I suppose they'd appear magical to Jacques Cousteau).

I don't find it impossible that the mechanism of these necklaces could be disguised or 
further miniaturized to appear invisible while used by a giant being, or (more likely in 
my mind) have their function duplicated by the advanced biology of highly evolved beings.

>Tzadkiel had magical powers

Like the youngest suitor of the Armiger's Daughter, I don't think we were meant to take the 
easy path, in seeking to understanding the text of this story.

Along with science, lying is an alternative explanation for what appears to be magic. I 
agree that dishonesty is probably the explanation for inhumi space travel. Not sure about
undines. Their swimming between the stars could refer to the sort of dream travel that we
see in other Wolfe stories.

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