miles, jonas, and that sailor guy, and sea/interplanetary vessels

Lee Berman · 09 Feb 2011, 23:06 · from 2011-February.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: Wed, 9 Feb 2011 18:06:22 -0500
Subject: (urth) miles, jonas, and that sailor guy,
	and sea/interplanetary vessels
Message-ID: <SNT123-W167599563ED24653077978CFED0 at phx.gbl>

>David Stockhoff- Do you actually think Erebus was sending a troopship of warriors up 
>the Gyoll to Nessus? That had never seriously occurred to me, although it explains their 
>eery presence. It seems certain they would lose if they attacked the Citadel---or were they 
>there in some way in support of Severian as Autarch?

Well first let me say that this is an awfully long story about nothing much happening. I 
interpret such a story as being important more for the telling and who is telling it than
what actually happens. (I doubt we are meant to understand the true purposes of superhuman beings).
BTW, just rereading I noticed that the "manatees" are described as looking pale when they appear
in (green) moonlight.

What I mean is that a ship which invokes Abaia, undines and Erebus appearing on the Gyoll around 
the same time that Severian becomes Autarch reveals certain hidden connections between elements of 
the story. This is similar to the appearance of the Green Man and Agia appearing just after Severian
ingests the old Autarch's brain.

The narrator of the story is also important. An old grizzled sailor with an air of criminality
about him on a boat with a dark complected girl with laughing eyes and a sidelong gaze. Does this
pair remind you of another pair? (I mean Hethor and Agia). Note Severian first mistakes her for a 
slim lad.

The sailor claims to be Maxellindis' uncle but Severian doesn't believe that. (reminiscent of another 
mysterious "uncle" in my opinion, Cyriaca's).

>Jeff Wilson: It's suspicious that the Botanic Gardens nearby also have water flowing 
>to other places and times...

I agree. And in the Botanic Gardens we have a bent, old boatman also telling stories about "manatees"
Again, I think the narrator is as important as the story being told.

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