do the Hierogrammates care about the megatherians?

Jerry Friedman · 22 May 2011, 00:52 · from 2011-May.txt.gz

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From: jerry_friedman at yahoo.com (Jerry Friedman)
Date: Sat, 21 May 2011 17:52:32 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: (urth) do the Hierogrammates *care* about the megatherians?
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> From: James Wynn <crushtv at gmail.com>

> >> The other options  are that megatherians refers to a line of  human rulers 
>that
> >> have ruled under  Abaia's authority or a line  of human rulers that have
> >> fashioned themselves as  being like  Abaia or all the undersea powers.
> > Is there an objection to those  options?
> 
> Yeah, but I get that its aesthetic. It's just that it still  leaves open the 
>question "Why 17?" "Who did they rule?" We at least know  something of monstrous 
>undersea rulers. A reference to a some unknown rulers who  are vaguely related 
>to one of the giant beasts or all of them strikes me as  random. Some people 
>prefer that. I don't. Like the carefully laid structures in  this novel that 
>have been identified or are glimpsed.

Okay, is there an objection to the idea that the "megatherian" human rulers were 
early rulers of Ascia?

We don't know why 17, but if there are 17 sea creatures, we don't know why that 
number either.  (Other than the reference to the Politburo in either case, or 
the speculations in my previous post.)

It's true that the relation of the present "Group of 17" to these hypothetical 
17 founders is vague, but so is the relation of the present "Group of 17" to the 
hypothetical 17 sea creatures.

> >> And I  think we have  enough information to put the pieces together:
> >> 
> >> There are 17 recognized  "Great Beasts" who are ruling or have  ruled Urth.
> > Part of Urth?  And what makes you say they're  ruling?
> 
> Their various territories. They rule as the Storm King rules in  'An Evil 
>Guest'. And Abaia has an army.

Okay, that's one.

> >> Why would people NOT  write a  history of the alien powers that have 
>controlled
> >> and  influenced life on Urth for  millenia?
> > Because they have no  material?  It seems quite possible that people know 
>very
> > little of  those undersea powers' lives.
> 
> I think that's unlikely. The Ascians don't  *have* to follow Abaia. They choose 
>to (or originally chose to) for rational  reasons.

Interesting.  That never occurred to me.  I always imagined that the Ascians 
knew no more about Abaia's life than Lovecraft's characters knew about the life 
stories of Yog-Sothoth and Nyarlathotep.

Severian tells us, as I recall, that Abaia et al. could kill all the humans in 
the world but don't do so because they want to enslave everyone.  This suggests 
the possibility that they threatened the Ascians or just the future Ascian 
leaders, who went along.  I guess you could call that "rational reasons".  The 
Commonwealth, however, called their bluff.  Or maybe the sea creatures possessed 
the rulers of Ascia, as Dan'l suggested.  I don't see any hint that the Ascians 
decided to follow Abaia because of his impressive CV.

I think we'll have to disagree about what "Lives of" could mean.

Jerry Friedman

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