What is _Urth of the New Sun_ about?

Ron Henry · 20 Jan 2004, 14:35 · from rec.arts.sf.written.2004.mbox

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From: "Ron Henry" <ronhenry at blahblahblah.clarityconnectcom>
Subject: Re: What is _Urth of the New Sun_ about?
Date: Tue, 20 Jan 2004 09:35:50 -0500
Message-ID: <bujec7$jba$1 at news01.cit.cornell.edu>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written
References: <bss663$593$1 at panix1.panix.com> <Xns946188F9C4513mss2mediaonenet at 130.133.1.4> <qemIb.1404$Is5.488 at bignews4.bellsouth.net> <bteo4e$30n$1 at news01.cit.cornell.edu> <buhgd7$oj3$1 at panix2.panix.com>

> "Ron Henry" <ronhenry at blahblahblah.clarityconnectcom> said:
>
> > No, really, It's pretty clear from references in both the New Sun
> > and Long Sun series that Severian and the people of the Whorl who
> > come from the same Commonwealth as Severian, were South Americans.
> > (One off the cuff reference I can think of is that they drink
> > mat�.)
>
> How likely is it, though, that the equation "they drink mate' in that
> culture" == "that culture is located in South America" is going to
> remain continuously true for tens of thousands of years?

Well, as I've written before, I don't think the time BotNS/BotLS take
place is nearly as distant as most people suppose. Most of what happens
in the book is pretty recognizable and comprehensible to us, and
suggests at most a couple thousand years have passed, at most.

Honestly, I think this is one of the subtle Wolfean trickeries at
work -- it appears because of some tricks he is playing with sfnal
tropes -- like the dying sun, which a close reading reveals was
deliberately damaged, not fading from age, or a landscape seemingly more
altered, even tectonically, from our own (Severian might just be
confused with directions on occasion) -- to be much more remote from the
contemporary reader than it really is. Wolfe might also be teasing with
or satirizing some of these sfnal tropes -- it really doesn't take tens
or hundreds of thousands of years to spread urban blight down (or up) a
river valley, or to carve up the faces of mountains into monuments, as
20th-c. American history shows us pretty plainly. Most of the "lost
advanced tech" in the story is hardly "far future" (unless one accepts
now-naive "Golden Age" sf ideas of what the "far future" will be
like) -- hover cars, ray guns, neural torture devices, rocket ships as
big as buildings, whatever viral technique does the memory transfers,
etc.

That's how I read it anyhow. I'm sure milage will vary!

Ron

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