Hello, and a rehash of k

Tony Ellis · 01 May 1998, 14:12 · from urth-v0010.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 at futurenet.co.uk (Tony Ellis)
Subject: (urth) Re: Hello, and a rehash of k
Date: 1 May 1998 15:12:51 +0100
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[Posted from URTH, a mailing list about Gene Wolfe's New Sun and other work=
s]

                                                                     =20
01/05/98
                                                                      09:51
 RE>Hello, and a rehash of kimleesoong

FunkMonkey wrote:
>First I will touch on my ideas of how far in the future Urth is.  It has=20
>always been my contention that as Ushas had replaced Urth after the=20
>cataclysm, Urth had replaced Earth after some terreble cataclysm befell
>it.=20

Cataclysm? What cataclysm? :-)
One of the many many things I've always liked about TBOTNS is=20
that it _doesn't_ follow that well-worn path of "Earth: 500 years after
the Great Meteor Storm", or "Earth: 800 years after the Nuclear
Deluge", or whatever. We are at a time so remotely far into the=20
future that civilization has just fizzled out, "not with a bang, but
with a whimper".

Wolfe confirms this in the The Castle of the Otter, where he talks
about Urth being the "do-nothing future", where humanity "stays
at home... and waits for the money to run out."

>We are told all in the antechamber are decendents from ONE mythic
>figure, kimleesoong.

Well, we're told that KLS is the prisoner from whom the family
Jonas questions count their descent. That's not quite the same
thing. The very fact that the discrete group of prisoners who question
Jonas can be called a "family" tells us that the inhabitants of the=20
antechamber aren't one homogenous body. If they were all
descended from KLS, or even thought they were, wouldn't they
all be one family? And notice that Jonas talks about "the original
prisoners from whom they are descended", rather than "original=20
prisoner".

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

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