lupine crisis of faith

Gerry Quinn · 29 Dec 2010, 21:23 · 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: gerryq at indigo.ie (Gerry Quinn)
Date: Wed, 29 Dec 2010 21:23:52 -0000
Subject: (urth) lupine crisis of faith
References: <SNT123-W616D09475D3B0D41FAB358CF020 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <E7428DEF35634D0B8950E5C9CD7FC73D@jill>


From: "Lee Berman" <severiansola at hotmail.com>

>  I'd recently noticed that the end of UotNS, while sunny, is pretty 
> gnostic in its world-
>  view with four paired opposites for gods and a demon in the ocean. Now I 
> have Marc suggesting
>  that Urth/Ushas has a connection (urban or planetary) to that hellish 
> horror called Green.

However, the book explicitly indicates that they orbit different, distant 
stars.


>  Also someone's recent haunting question: "Who says the Megatherians were 
> killed on Ushas?".
>
>  Who indeed. Just a little common sense should tell me that earth-bound, 
> immortal Megatherians
>  would welcome Ushas and be mortally fearful of the future of ice, the one 
> thing that could
>  trap them for eternity.

Nor is it indicated anywhere that they try to stop Severian - indeed, they 
seem to help him.  As to how things go after the coming of the New Sun, we 
are not told, although the presence of the the Green Man suggests life will 
at least at some future time be tolerable.

Wolfe never suggested that the coming of the New Sun would solve all human 
problems.  But without it, Urth dies.


>  If Wolfe was truly trying to imply that the Ragnarok future was a bad 
> one, I would think he
>  would include a small hint of it to be found in Master Ash. But nope. The 
> guy is completely,
>  and entirely a cool and righteous dude.

Righteous he may be, but he's still the last guy left alive on a snowball. 
His character is irelevant.


>  Then we have the androgynous Green Man who represents the Ushas future. 
> In their first meeting
>  the Green Man describes himself as: "A great seer, a great liar, like 
> every man whose foot is in
>  a trap.".  Should we believe anything else he says about himself? When 
> someone tells us they are
>  a liar we should not believe them any further. But in this case we end up 
> doing so, anyway.

Actually he is demonstrated to speak the truth.


>The green man threw back his head and laughed. Much later I was to hear the 
>sound the alzabo makes
>as it ranges the snow-swept tablelands of the high country; its laughter is 
>horrible, but the green
>man?s was more terrible, and I drew away from him. ?You?re not a human 
>being,? I said. ?Not now, if
>you ever were.?
>
>  Why would Wolfe include this passage? Worse than the alzabo! Why??? I'm 
> afraid I now know.

His laughter is of despair at the current state of Urth.  This doesn't 
indicate any secret horror in his future.

- Gerry Quinn

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