Faterh Inire

David Stockhoff · 14 Oct 2011, 16:24 · from 2011-October.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: dstockhoff at verizon.net (David Stockhoff)
Date: Fri, 14 Oct 2011 12:24:05 -0400
Subject: (urth) Faterh Inire
In-Reply-To: <4E985FF0.8080404 at clueland.com>
References: <SNT123-W38C3D8C3CE874AD322F4C5CFE10 at phx.gbl>
	<CAMBsQ=L2fMRmRh2aGpoV+tPQY3WyBVTJ231CPigT2btkt3nNJg at mail.gmail.com>
	<4E984D27.8070001 at verizon.net> <4E985FF0.8080404 at clueland.com>
Message-ID: <4E986225.3070008 at verizon.net>

On 10/14/2011 12:14 PM, Jeff Wilson wrote:
> 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.
I'd think he would have thought of that earlier, being a smart guy, but 
it's all good.


---
avast! Antivirus: Outbound message clean.
Virus Database (VPS): 111014-0, 10/14/2011
Tested on: 10/14/2011 12:24:05 PM
avast! - copyright (c) 1988-2011 AVAST Software.
http://www.avast.com

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