Losing Imitation

Lee Berman · 31 Dec 2010, 15:49 · 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: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee Berman)
Date: Fri, 31 Dec 2010 10:49:24 -0500
Subject: (urth) Losing Imitation
Message-ID: <SNT123-W32E5386B9F0CF8DC50467CF040 at phx.gbl>

>Gerry Quinn: Have you considered the possibility that "Urth is Green" has a metaphorical meaning?  
>That Green is what Earth/Urth can become if we lose our humanity?  It would seem to fit reasonably 
>well with the themes Wolfe is exploring in the Short Sun trilogy.

I think this is insightful. Still, being SF, I think Wolfe tends to take what is metaphor on Earth
and turn it into reality on Urth ("fleshed from dreams", so to speak).  

I think there is evidence that humans on Urth during Severian's time DID lose their humanity, evidenced
by the relentless institutionalized cruelty with which they treat each other, both in the Commonwealth
and in Ascia, the only two places on Urth we are able to see.

Likewise, there is evidence that the Neighbors lost their..erm...Neighborhoodiness?..on Green and did
not treat other beings in their star system (including in the Whorl) very well.

We could haggle over time frames, but I think there is a suggestion that the star (whatever it might
be named) of Blue and Green may have gone through a black hole/white fountain process affecting both 
planets.

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