The Outsider

Andrew Mason · 17 Dec 2010, 11:52 · from 2010-December.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: andrew.mason53 at googlemail.com (Andrew Mason)
Date: Fri, 17 Dec 2010 11:52:25 +0000
Subject: (urth) The Outsider
Message-ID: <AANLkTin14AJa9mCG2CJt7Ly5m6XAat0BucKPEhwjiiY9 at mail.gmail.com>

Gerry Quinn wrote:

> (I don't think most people, including Catholic theologians, would be shocked
> by the notion of Incarnations on differnet planets of our universe
> either...)

That is the basis of the (in some circles) well-known Christmas hymn
'Every star shall sing a carol', by Sidney Carter.

On the other hand it is firmly rejected by C.S. Lewis, who seems OK
with the idea of different incarnations in different universes.

None of which, of course, proves anything about Wolfe. I agree that
your reading is the simplest; it fits in with the fact that Severian's
world has a past very (incredibly) like our own, and the clear
existence of a Christianity-analogue there. These can be explained in
other ways; but to insist that they must be seems to me to turn on a
theological assumption that it's not clear Wolfe shares. I'm inclined
to share it myself; but manifestly not everyone does, so I don't
insist on it as a principle of interpretation.

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