Awaken Gods of Ushas

m.driussi · 30 May 1997, 19:53 · from urth-v0001.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: m.driussi at genie.com
Subject: (urth) Awaken Gods of Ushas
Date: Fri, 30 May 97 19:53:00 GMT
Message-ID: <urth-v0001-0086 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0001/0086.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]

Reply:  Item #2671081 from URTH at LISTS.BEST.COM@INET01#

cephalothorax,

Needlesstosay, I'm quite pleased that you are enjoying the Lexicon.
You asked about Sev Sleeper waking up the others.  Yes, it is an
inspired guess on my part.  In the last chapter Sev asks his priest
to take him to Odillo, and finds them "sleeping" just as he himself
was presumed to be "sleeping."  This harkens back to the last chapter
of CITADEL where Severian writes: "I have disturbed my own tomb, and
now I go to lie in it"; but it also acts as a new threshold, a
(semi-?) cliffhanger--we know that Severian has finally realized his
godling status and stature; we wonder what he will do next to fulfill
the prophesy of the Green Man's society, in the same way that we
wondered at the end of TBOTNS how Severian, clearly on the threshold
of demi-god status at that time, would manage to bring the New Sun.

While I haven't tried to even sketch out the Greening of Ushas, I
sense that his first step is to revive the others.  After all, this
is the same sort of thing he was always trying to do in TBOTNS, so it
is "within character" to the point of almost mundane predictability.

=3Dmantis=3D

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