Do the Hierogrammates care about the Megatherians

Andrew Mason · 19 May 2011, 22:16 · from 2011-May.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: Thu, 19 May 2011 23:16:33 +0100
Subject: (urth) Do the Hierogrammates *care* about the Megatherians
Message-ID: <BANLkTim1-mnjM5Ea0wnOMOxa_2pdXqb_Wg at mail.gmail.com>

David Stockhoff wrote:

> -I didn't know to take Dr Talos' play seriously the first time I read
> TBOTNS.

No, I don't think anyone did. But we may wonder whether this
represents actual concealment within the world of BOTNS, or whether
it's just Wolfe's tendency to make things less clear than they might
be (and then be surprised when people don't get it).

We know, now, that Dr Talos's play was based on Canog's book, which
was based on Severian's own testimony. So he, at least, was not trying
to conceal anything.

There's also another passage in _Urth_ that bears on this. Apheta says
that the people of Urth have a choice between slow death, and death
followed by rebirth. Severian says that he has known this since
childhood. Gunnie says 'We didn't', but then adds 'In religion - but
no one took any notice of that' (or words to that effect). So I think
the destructive effect of the New Sun was known, in the sense that it
was not deliberately concealed, but, as with many things, people at
large took no notice of it. (One might also mention the Conciliator's
title of 'Black Sun', and Dorcas's saying she has read some terrible
things about him.)

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