Spiritual and Ecological Sucession

Jerry Friedman · 13 Jan 2011, 04:14 · from 2011-January.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: jerry_friedman at yahoo.com (Jerry Friedman)
Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2011 20:14:18 -0800 (PST)
Subject: (urth) Spiritual and Ecological Sucession
In-Reply-To: <SNT123-W386F7F3178E459DD9C64D2CFF10 at phx.gbl>
References: <SNT123-W386F7F3178E459DD9C64D2CFF10 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <833846.6593.qm at web114715.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>

> From: Lee Berman <severiansola at hotmail.com> 
> >Jerry Friedman: Seriously again, there are hints that the Severian  in /Short 
>Sun/ is a different 
>
> >iteration of him than the Severian in /New  Sun/.  If that's true, there may 
>be no Ushas in 
>
> >the world of the  /Short Sun/.  Urth may still be Urth.
> 
> This is an interesting idea  that I hadn't heard before (from others).

Others here have mentioned it, maybe when you weren't reading the list or 
something.  I think
more than one person has come up with it independently, but I'm not sure.

> Do the hints about Severian you 
> mention have to do with Merryn? Other things?

One of the two main hints, as I see it, is indeed Merryn.  In TCotC, Severian 
strongly implies that
she's a stranger to him, but in RttW they're together.  And they see it as 
nothing special, though
the picture we get in BotNS is that the torturers have very few and carefully 
controlled
interactions with the witches, and that a (free) girl in the Matachin Tower 
would be a very
strange event.

The other, which someone else here pointed out, is that Severian takes Silkhorn 
and Co. to
see his three-legged dog, and Hide describes Severian as still growing and 
younger than Hide,
who Silkhorn says is sixteen.  But Severian says he briefly had Triskele not 
long before he
became captain of apprentices and met Thecla, when he was apparently about 
twenty, and
I don't think we can see him as a growing boy then.

A minor point is that Hide says the journeymen's hoods are trimmed with red, and 
in all the
mentions of the torturers' clothes in TBotnS, we never hear anything about that.

A strange point is that the young Severian tells Silkhorn he won't put Silkhorn 
in his book,
since nobody would believe him.  Aside from letting Hide tell us how good 
Silhorn is, this
suggests an explanation for why Silkhorn (as the ghost of Malrubius) isn't in 
TBotNS.  On
the other hand, Severian did put the ghost of Malrubius in his book, and many 
other
incredible things.

Of course there are answers to these hints: we could speculate on why Severian 
doesn't
mention his acquaintance with Merryn, and maybe the chronology is wrong or 
Hide's
estimate of Severian's age is wrong.  So I just brought it up as a possibility 
that might be
worth considering.

Jerry Friedman

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