Urth Digest, Vol 91, Issue 78

Andrew Mason · 16 Mar 2012, 23:18 · from 2012-March.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: andrew.mason53 at googlemail.com (Andrew Mason)
Date: Fri, 16 Mar 2012 23:18:33 +0000
Subject: (urth) Urth Digest, Vol 91, Issue 78
In-Reply-To: <mailman.81077.1331939477.4681.urth-urth.net at lists.urth.net>
References: <mailman.81077.1331939477.4681.urth-urth.net at lists.urth.net>
Message-ID: <CAM3O41K=pK+mpsE5dqQkXPDumoDse1S7Tc5oW3t_SE1a6e8wmQ at mail.gmail.com>

Gerry Quinn wrote:
>
>> It's in 'The Best of Gene Wolfe'. I don't have it word for word, but
>> it goes something like this: 'This story is based on a playful
>> theological speculation. If Jesus had to come into the world to save
>> it it, what about other worlds? Does he have to come into them if he
>> wants to save them? ('World' is here misinterpreted as 'planet' in
>> order to get a story out of it.)'
> Hmm... maybe it?s just that your paraphrase that doesn?t fully convey the sense you took from the original ? but I don?t get the sense that a ?playful theological speculation? is a joke in the sense of something that could never be true.

No, it doesn't have to be, but 'misinterpreted' seems fairly clear.
(The question then is what would be the correct interpretation - does
it mean 'universe', in the sense in which Severian's universe and ours
are different,  or does it mean the whole created order? This is a
question that might not arise outside a science-fictional context, of
course.)

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