Five Severians - Severian-as-clone

Michael Thayer · 20 Dec 2013, 17:01 · from 2013-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: michael.o.thayer at gmail.com (Michael Thayer)
Date: Fri, 20 Dec 2013 12:01:59 -0500
Subject: (urth) Five Severians - Severian-as-clone
Message-ID: <CAHS3GWexHFPEtsdmKp3eF3+vBJHHH9_vMxE902hJ6N8He8T+Hg at mail.gmail.com>

>David Stockhoff:  It's possible that only he can see it, but . . . (b) the
wildlife find it easily enough . . .

My reading is quite the contrary one.  We are told that the wildlife cannot
"hear" or "scent" Severian as he watches them through the mausloeum window,
though some animals come "two cubits from [his] face."  Shadow, 12.

>David Stockhoff: Another point that just occurred to me. We do need to
follow Occam's Razor. Therefore,
---Any theory that proposes something as complicated as, say, a
laboratory hidden in time that has cloning and mind-control technology
and that grows and programs cloned puppets to insert them into
manipulated time streams is just too complicated.
---A coffin-corpse mausoleum theory only needs to explain how corpses
get in. A clone-storage mausoleum theory needs to explain not only how
they got in, but how they will get out. And besides, any mechanism that
could do both probably would not need clone storage in the first place.

I agree with your method.  The only question is whether a hidden clone
laboratory dislocated in time is the simplest explanation.  For instance,
it would be a mistake to conclude that the Citadel is a traditional citadel
rather than a spaceport just because the citadel is the simpler explanation
of the two.  In tBotnS, a castle tower is not a castle tower at all, but
a space rocket.  A poor traveler is not a poor traveler, but a marooned
robot from the distant past with a human face grafted onto his metallic
body.  A two-headed demonic monster is not a two-headed demonic monster,
but a former intergalactic hegemon who has had his head surgically grafted
onto another's body to extend his own biological viability.  Witches (a
witch at least, the Cumaen) and sirens (Juturna and the other undines) are
not witches and sirens, but space aliens meddling in human affairs.  A
divine prophet from the past is not a divine prophet from the past, but a
machine-projected time-traveler recently returned from beyond this solar
system.  The entire conceit of the novel is that the setting appears to be
that of ancient myth and medieval high fantasy, but it is in fact a far
future hyper-techno space age.  In light of this, I think we should
exercise caution in slicing away, Occam-style, the possibility that a
mausoleum is something more than a mausoleum, especially where that
mausoleum is imbued with such import and strangeness.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20131220/300aff5a/attachment.htm>

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