Agia's Weapons

David Stockhoff · 21 Dec 2011, 17:44 · from 2011-December.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: Wed, 21 Dec 2011 12:44:21 -0500
Subject: (urth) Agia's Weapons
In-Reply-To: <SNT123-W3548408E38E9A135BFADE8CFA50 at phx.gbl>
References: <SNT123-W3548408E38E9A135BFADE8CFA50 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <4EF21AF5.4080105 at verizon.net>

On 12/21/2011 11:52 AM, Lee Berman wrote:
> David Stockhoff: Could pedo/hebephilia not be a clue to a deeper evil rather than a sign
> of identity?
>
> In BotNS, I think it serves both purposes. Incest also. Remember how Dorcas considers
> herself to be an unclean spirit?


Yes, but she doesn't try to enslave Urth.
>
>> if there is "real" evil in Severian's world, then it will find that willingness and bring
>> it to fruition. Thus, Hethor's use of sorcery, Agia's use of every weapon available, the
>> Leech's (and possibly Baldander's) abuse of children in the pursuit of further knowledge
>> and power, and the undines' blind hope that an executioner autarch will see things their way.
>
> Yes. I see Urth/Ushas as Wolfean allegory for earth's Flood. The idea being that evil exists,
> in some manner, independently of a human being. Earth (like Urth) was overwhelmed with evil
> to an extent that humanity could not resist it, because of fallen angel, demon-human mating
> (i.e. Nephilim). Evil had become intrinsic to our race. Only a genocidal Flood could remove it,
> saving the one pure family left. In BotNS, the sailors on Tzadkiel's ship had been away from
> Urth long enought to not be (genetically) corrupted by the alien invaders and they were used
> to repopulate Ushas as Noah's family was used to repopulate earth.

Possibly. The narrator does refer to many alien corruptions without 
excluding humans.
>
>> BTW, making Inire the source of all these seems to defeat the point of
>> evil---if evil had a point source it would be a disease, not a moral choice.
>
>
> I think, to Wolfe, it is both.  By analogy, is alcoholism a disease or a choice?


It can't be both---they are utterly and diametrically opposed 
conceptions of evil---but they can work in combination. I proposed a 
"predisposition" to evil, which all humans have to some degree but which 
allows choice and action. There can be no point in writing fiction about 
the total lack of moral choices, even within a structure (cultural, 
political, paranoid-narrative) that forces those choices. Free will is 
very much a problem in BNS, even given that the protagonist gets to make 
his choices more than once.
>
> After the Flood (on Ushas and earth) evil still exists, but sufficiently reduced that it can be
> resisted by humanity with "good" choices. Though perhaps some people, for whatever reason, can
> be born or twisted into such an evil nature that good is no longer really a choice for them?

Severian's theory of incremental moral progress from iteration to 
iteration does seem to suggest this, or at least the reverse of it. And 
I have to admit that Wolfe's structures (throughout the Sun Cycle) do 
suggest an affinity between morals and genetics, though I have assumed 
that this is metaphoric, not real. Your theory seems to move fluidly 
between "evil" and "corruption" in a way that I find creepy but by the 
same token impossible to refute. Fiction is always about the worst 
possible things one can imagine.

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