Fate, undines and Autarc

Tony Ellis · 29 Jan 1998, 10:13 · from urth-v0006.mbox · original

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: "Tony Ellis" <tellis at futurenet.co.uk>
Subject: (urth) Re: Fate, undines and Autarc
Date: 29 Jan 1998 11:13:13 +0100
Message-ID: <urth-v0006-0456 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0006/0456.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

[Posted from URTH, a mailing list about Gene Wolfe's New Sun and other work=
s]

                                                                      =3D
29/01/98
                                                                      =3D
09:37
 RE>Fate, undines and Autarchs

CRCulver (et al):
>     The undines did not bring their own destruction, they survived the
>coming of the New Sun and Urth's transformation into Ushas, as Mr. =3D
Driussi
>explains. However, I wonder why the undine would have saved him if it =3D
led to
>the destruction of Erebus, who was an ally of Abaia.

Don't forget that TBOTNS is set in a universe of multiple possible =3D
futures.
In some futures, no doubt, saving Severian leads to him becoming Autarch
and satrap of Erebus, in others it just leads to him failing further down =
=3D
the
line - remember the chilly future seen from Master Ash's tower? Saving
him is a gamble, and it just happens that in the time-strand the novels
follow it's a gamble that fails.

Having said that, I'm not sure that it's correct even to say that saving
Severian "led to the destruction of Erebus". Erebus lives under the sea
just like the undines, so presumably he survives too.

>Is the copy of the BOTNS which is given to Thecla in her cell Severian's
>first manuscript, or a copy? (I don't know if we have a definite answer =
=3D
to
>this).

Personally I'm still reeling from the bombshell that Thecla is able to
order the "lost" BOTNS from her local library in the first place. I think =
=3D
it
must be not only a copy, but a major rewrite of the manuscript Severian
pens. How else could he fail to recognise the New Sun as himself, or
walk blindly into the various dangers he encounters, if he's read the=20
narrative we have?

I would be interested to know just how many versions of the BOTNS
are actually out there, and how they differ. Any educated guesses?

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