Do the Hierogrammates care about the Megatherians?

Gerry Quinn · 20 May 2011, 18:01 · 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: gerryq at indigo.ie (Gerry Quinn)
Date: Fri, 20 May 2011 19:01:11 +0100
Subject: (urth) Do the Hierogrammates *care* about the Megatherians?
References: <BANLkTim1qCqO0Ro7vCZLQjX8rfc0Da=3ZQ at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <9D4C16F63FA741FB8F9E31EBC50A92E0@jill>


From: "Andrew Mason" <andrew.mason53 at googlemail.com>
> Gerry Quinn  wrote:
>
> > What is the basis for saying the flood is universal? It is not predicted 
> > to
> > be such in Dr. Talos's play - he says in fact that new continents will 
> > rise
> > from the sea. The old Autarch says the Ascians will survive the advent 
> > of
> > the White Fountain better than the Commonwealth. And there obviously 
> > isn't
> > enough water to drown the continents anyway unless they are all 
> > flattened
> > somehow to the same altitude.

> I think the main evidence of effective universality is that
> Baldanders, when asked 'Who will survive?' says 'Those on ships,
> possibly. Those whose ships are in the air or in the void, certainly'.
> This suggests that not many people will survive on land.

Okay, that certainly suggests it - though might Baldanders be referring only 
to people in particular parts of the world?


> It doesn't rule out the new continents, nor does it mean that some
> mountain tops won't continue to stick out, since they are probably
> uninhabited anyway. It's also compatible with the Ascians adapting
> better, if they have better ships and planes (though I'm not sure
> whether the Autarch had a clear idea of what the effect of the flood
> would be. That he had some idea that there was going to be a cataclysm
> of some kind is suggested by the line 'Many will seek to flee by this
> path if the pelagic argosy sights land'.) Certainly I don't think only
> the people Severian meets survived.

I thought the phrase referred to a possible invasion of the Commonwealth by 
ships of the undersea monsters.  (By the way didn't somebody say they saw a 
mysterious ship travelling up Gyoll?  It might be such a ship.)

- Gerry Quinn

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