Thea's Identity

DAVID STOCKHOFF · 12 Apr 2013, 15:13 · from 2013-April.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, 12 Apr 2013 08:13:33 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: (urth) Thea's Identity
In-Reply-To: <51681508.9050902 at irit.fr>
References: <BLU175-W31E713EF533B22755ED221CFC10 at phx.gbl>
	<51681508.9050902 at irit.fr>
Message-ID: <1365779613.25709.YahooMailNeo at web84502.mail.ne1.yahoo.com>






>________________________________
> From: Sergei SOLOVIEV <soloviev at irit.fr>
>To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net> 
>Sent: Friday, April 12, 2013 10:07 AM
>Subject: Re: (urth) Thea's Identity
> 
>But in Ottoman empire the harems (seraglios) had reproductive purpose as a central one.
>Moreover, since it was difficult to apply the principle of "primogeniture" with the great
>number of babies, when the time to designate a heir arrived, it was desperate for women
>to fight for their sons to be chosen (by intrigue etc.) because usually all other male descendants
>after the heir was chosen risked elimination. It is quite different with autarchs because
>the successor is defined differently.
>
>
>
>Exactly---an excellent summary, much better than mine. This is why the autarchs' seraglio cannot function exactly as did the sultans'. So we have two interpretive choices:
>
>(1) The seraglio is only for holding hostages. It may also be a leftover from an era when it did have a reproductive/imperial function. The current Autarch's inability to impregnate ironically highlights this and may symbolize Urthly infertility as well, but doesn't by itself make a harem irrelevant to the succession, because it's already been irrelevant for a chiliad.
>
>(2) It is a fully functional harem, but in parallel to the usual operation. That is, there's no sex---especially since Severian's predecessor on the throne came back unmanned from Yesod---but lots of intrigue, because everything else is in play---except, presumably, the succession itself. This is perhaps why the concubines like to pass as khaibits---because otherwise they ain't gettin' any action.
>
>As for that succession---as far as I can recall there is no evidence anyone knows about the central gimmick of the Autarchy except the Autarch himself and Father Inire, and I suppose Vodalus and whatsername. So the entire seraglio may be under the impression that their kids have a shot at the throne. Keeps 'em focused. And if they think they have a shot, then they have a shot. (I grant that under this logic, you'd think the Autarch would disband the harem system to protect his throne. But he didn't. Why?)
>
>Finally, I think the key phrase in your description is "the great number of babies."Think about it.
>
>Finally finally, there is the male question. Males were killed at a new heir's ascension, females discarded or sent somewhere, or killed at birth. Does Urth have a surplus of female clones? It would seem so.
>
>If one is to propose routine use of cloning at any level, especially within the House Absolute, one must account for it impact on all this.
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20130412/68271014/attachment.htm>

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