vanished people=Hieros

Lee Berman · 10 Nov 2011, 14:20 · from 2011-November.txt.gz

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From: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee Berman)
Date: Thu, 10 Nov 2011 09:20:09 -0500
Subject: (urth) vanished people=Hieros
Message-ID: <SNT123-W16730E2DB96161E2BF3409CFDC0 at phx.gbl>

>Ant?nio Pedro Marques: Btw, why is it that I keep imagining Blue with lots of ocean and 
>Green with very little? It's quite doubtful Green's jungles could be there without 
>oceans around.

>Gerry Quinn: Because in Blue most of the people we meet live by the sea, and in Green they 
>all live in the jungle.

Yes! I think this is on the proper path to understanding. Planetologically, Green might be
expected to have oceans. But Green is not a planet. It is a literary creation. Larry Niven
or some other hard SF writer would have mentioned oceans to keep the science believable. But 
Wolfe does not.

And, in my opinion, this is intentional. He cannot mention any oceans on Green. It would 
ruin the model he has been building with Ushas and with Blue. It would completely water
down (heh) the scene where the sewer is flooded and cleansed. The fallen Garden of Eden 
theme of Green would be lost along with the Flood allusions for Ushas and Blue.

We do see and visit rudimentary jungles on Blue. There is also a relatively small population
of inhumi.  This fits the model, and serves the same purpose as Severian seeing Juturna on 
Ushas. After a world cleansing there is always some evil still left. But the cleansing reduces 
evil to a manageable level, so humanity has a chance.

As I see Wolfe's thinking:

Anicent earth was so overrun and corrupted with fallen angels/demons/pagan gods that God
had to cleanse it with a flood and start over with the one pure family available.

Urth was so overrun and corrupted with similar beings that The Increate needed a flood to
cleanse it and start over with uncorrupted humans who had been away from Urth for a long
time.

Green IS so overrun with serpent/reptilian demons that humanity has no chance there. It is
Eden after the fall. It needs a flood. 

And showing an ocean on Green would kill the unscientific image of endless jungle that Wolfe 
has purposefully put into Antonio's (and my) mind.

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