What is _Urth of the New Sun_ about?

Nancy Lebovitz · 21 Jan 2004, 08:49 · from rec.arts.sf.written.2004.mbox

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From: nancy at unix5.netaxs.com (Nancy Lebovitz)
Subject: Re: What is _Urth of the New Sun_ about?
Date: Wed, 21 Jan 2004 08:49:35 GMT
Message-ID: <z2rPb.126$af7.81215 at newshog.newsread.com>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written
References: <bss663$593$1 at panix1.panix.com> <bteo4e$30n$1 at news01.cit.cornell.edu> <buhgd7$oj3$1 at panix2.panix.com> <bujec7$jba$1 at news01.cit.cornell.edu>

In article <bujec7$jba$1 at news01.cit.cornell.edu>,
Ron Henry <ronhenry at blahblahblah.clarityconnectcom> wrote:
>
>> "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

What about the beach where all the "sand" is actually broken glass?

>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.
-- 
   Nancy Lebovitz    nancy at netaxs.com  www.nancybuttons.com  
                       Now, with bumper stickers

Using your turn signal is not "giving information to the enemy"

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