A Point of Order

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes · 17 Jun 2002, 16:03 · from urth-v0206.mbox · original

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From: "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes" <ddanehy at siebel.com>
Subject: (urth) A Point of Order
Date: Mon, 17 Jun 2002 09:03:28 -0700
Message-ID: <urth-v0206-1254 at digest.urth.net>
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God does promise Noah that He will not again destroy all the world by=20
water.

The coming of the White Fountain does not violate this promise, because
all the world is _not_ destroyed.

If "all the world" means the land masses, then it is not so much destroyed
as rearranged -- if the prophecies of the coming of the New Sun are as=20
accurate as they seem to be, the old continents are destroyed and new=20
continents arise. Sev winds up on an island in the middle of a vast sea;=20
but that's where a continent used to be. You wouldn't expect to find a=20
new continent right where the old one was.

If "all the world" means, as it does in many languages (e.g., French=20
"tout le monde"), "all the people in the world," then, again, this is
clearly not the case -- we see a few people saved; there is no particular
reason to assume that similar scattered people do not survive all over=20
the globe; indeed, though Wolfe's ultraDickensian tenedency toward
plotting-by-coincidence could in fact have Severian run across the
_only_ survivors, combining that with (some of) them also being folks=20
he already knows one way or another seems, to me, excessive; more likely
there are a number of survivors and Synchronicity Central brings him to
the ones he knows.

--Blattid
                                    Republicans must always be on guard=20
                                against sounding Teutonic. -- P. Noonan

--=20

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