Some problems if the Pancreator/Outsider is the

James Jordan · 14 Jun 2002, 17:19 · from urth-v0206.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: James Jordan <jbjordan4 at cox.net>
Subject: RE: (urth) Some problems if the Pancreator/Outsider is the
Date: Fri, 14 Jun 2002 12:19:46 -0500
Message-ID: <urth-v0206-1240 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0206/1240.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

At 03:33 PM 6/12/2002 -0400, Rostrum wrote:

>I assumed that these were deliberate parodies of Islam, Judaism,
>Christianity, etc. by Typhon et. al.  But since Typhon thought it was all
>bunk, he inadvertently incorporated bits that connect to the real God -
>references to Jesus, the Outsider, etc.

         Good point. Hadn't thought of it that way. Just what Typhon might=20
well have done.

>I think the only out is to either assume this is an earlier universe or
>that we're not supposed to try to literally fit Severian's adventures into
>Christian Salvation History -- they are an icon of God's work in our
>world, rather than literal speculation about how our story might continue.

         Well put.

> > Well, if I recall, Tzad is a Hierogrammate. But I could be wrong.
>
>P.S. -- Can't resist sharing this: my wife was telling our three-year-old
>twins stories from the Bible and they pointed to the story of the Plagues
>of Egypt and wanted to hear it.  When she got to the part about Passover
>and the Angel of Death, one of girls screwed up her face and said,
>
>"Angels not do that."

         Oddly, Wolfe reacted quite negatively to the God As Torturer idea=20
when I presented it to him. I thought "Shadow of the Torturer" meant that=20
Severian was God's shadow-agent, torturing the world through distresses=20
toward perfection. But Wolfe did not like that. No, no. The whole torture=20
business is Severian's horrible background out of which he is struggling to=20
emerge as a more decent person. As for me, I like MY idea better! It=20
certainly seems to fit the overall narrative better.

Nutria



--=20

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