Faterh Inire

Jeff Wilson · 14 Oct 2011, 16:14 · from 2011-October.txt.gz

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From: jwilson at clueland.com (Jeff Wilson)
Date: Fri, 14 Oct 2011 11:14:40 -0500
Subject: (urth) Faterh Inire
In-Reply-To: <4E984D27.8070001 at verizon.net>
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Message-ID: <4E985FF0.8080404 at clueland.com>

On 10/14/2011 9:54 AM, David Stockhoff wrote:
>
>
> On 10/14/2011 6:59 AM, larry miller wrote:
>> yeah OK I can see the prospect of Inire going back seeking knowledge
>> from the past. Maybe he wished to learn all he could about humanitys
>> religious beliefs to help him propagate the New Suns legend in the far
>> future? I am aware of Urth being in a previous universe than our own
>> but it was always my understanding that the Urth iteration and ours
>> were still very similiar (the Apollo landing picture, or the
>> Antechambers references to Alice in Wonderland for example).
> Well, if it's an iteration, it's going to be similar. The iterations get
> "better."
>
> It's complicated by the fact that (AFAICT) Severian is in the future of
> that iteration which is in our past. His universe is older than ours but
> has not yet been born. Thus the translator's note about excavating the
> deep future.

We can suppose that the translator "G.W." believes it is from our 
absolute future due to the futuristic details of the ms and the 
anachronistic artifacts associated with it. He believes he has been 
shown buildings in our time that will endure into this future era, but 
this is all circumstantial.

My money is still on the authorital-afterthought hypothesis, where Wolfe 
writes about this future age, then belatedly realizes Severian being in 
the absolute as well as relative future has blasphemous implications and 
retroactively (heh) places Sev's story in a previous incarnation to 
avoid making no-Jesus Urth an improvement over with-Jesus Earth or 
making G-d's promise to Noah a lie.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at clueland.com
Computational Intelligence Laboratory - Texas A&M Texarkana
< http://www.tamut.edu/CIL >

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