Merger

Andrew Mason · 30 Jan 2011, 22:20 · 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: andrew.mason53 at googlemail.com (Andrew Mason)
Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2011 22:20:46 +0000
Subject: (urth) Merger
Message-ID: <AANLkTimpUf=m6Z3CAGxcgBMp+RQXnwFWN=9uQaiPNpi3 at mail.gmail.com>

Lee Berman wrote:

>
>> Can someone hook me up with the story where Appian is named?
>
> The name of the story I think you are looking for is "The Cat".

However, I don't think it's clear that the Appian of 'The Cat' is in
fact Severian's immediate predecessor. It could be doubted, partly
because it's difficult to make the dates work - there's some
discussion of that in the archives - though of course dates in _New
Sun_ are always a bit mysterious - but also because it would be odd
for Wolfe to keep the Autarch's name mysterious throughout the series,
and then give it away casually in a short story.

The unnamed major characters, and what we are meant to do about them,
are one of the ongoing mysteries of the work. My suspicion is that we
might be able to find their names by reflection on saints. Perhaps the
Autarch is called after a saint who was a eunuch? According to
Wikipedia (yes, I know...) the first definite eunuch saint was
Ignatius of Constantinople (not to be confused with some more famous
Ignatiuses).

>
> Toward the end of Citadel I think, Severian ponders that he seems to have revived Triskele
> before he received The Claw. He has two theories.
>
> 1. He will succeed in bringing the New Sun and such an awesome power of planetary resurrection
> can't help but echo backward in time and confer a small dose of it to younger Severian.
>
> 2. He will fail to bring the New Sun and be unmanned. But the hierogrammates will bestow upon
> him a nice parting gift to make up for his lost testicles and the gift of resurrection will
> be bestowed retroactively in time.

I don't think that's right. What he seems to say is that, given he
will be castrated if he fails, there should be some counterbalancing
reward if he succeeds - not a consolation prize, but something to
justify the risk.. (What he actually says is 'should I conform to
their desires', which I guess is a bit ambiguous, but I would read
this as 'should I pass the test - should I prove to be the sort of
person they want me to be'.) So both proposals turn on his succeeding
in bringing the New Sun; the difference is in the source, in one case
the Increate, working through the natural sympathy of things, in the
other the Hierogrammates, as an explicit reward.

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