Short Story 48: Peritonitis

Marc Aramini · 14 Aug 2013, 14:20 · from 2013-August.txt.gz

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From: marcaramini at yahoo.com (Marc Aramini)
Date: Wed, 14 Aug 2013 07:20:29 -0700
Subject: (urth) Short Story 48: Peritonitis
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> 
> Lee wrote: I agree that similar literary principles are atwork with Shadow Children, along with Neighbors, Inhumi, Abaia/undines, Tzadkiel/Apheta,the gods of the Whorl and maybe the gods Latro encounters.We, as humans, take our gender and our individual identity as fixed constants. But thatis not going to be the case for non-human characters. What does it mean when we are given the gender and individual name of a bacterium, a Shadow Child, an Abo, a giant asexual sea monster, an angel, an electronic god or dreamy, plural goat people?

One more thing that just struck me is the nature of this self referential myth making - Deepdelver is a hero from his perspective and the point of view of his fellows, but his success pretty much doomed everybody.  Saving one bacterium cost them the world itself.  Silk and Severian have these moments too- Severian makes it pretty clear with his rhetoric even before Urth of the New Sun that he intends people to regard him as autarch and new sun, but his "heroic" effort pretty much destroys the world.  Silk sets up the exodus and then retreats for one woman, and everyone outside the whorl laments at how terrible things have gotten in his absence.  Can this salvation save them from what they truly are? 

Interesting position for heroes to be in - almost accomplishing as much degenerate bad as master villains, while villains like Typhon become more like stewards than one would suppose. This is part of why Wolfe's writing informed by religion is so much more interesting than a whole lot of other religious work. 
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