Digest urth.v029.n035

Hi Corncrake! Did you hear the reading of "In the Heart of the Sea" on Radio 4 recently? It was their "Book of the Week" about a month ago and was absolutely excellent - really gripping. (I have a long drive to work each day - from Minety, Wiltshire to Oxford - and get to listen to a lot of radio.) The account of the Essex survivors' cannibalism was horrendous and terribly moving. The captain had promised the cabin boy's mother that he would look after her son on the voyage, but he ended up shooting him and eating him. It's an extraordinary tale. As to what happens to Severian at and immediately after his passage through the gate of Nessus, well, you do gradually get bits and pieces of the story, a detail here and there throughout the length of TCotC. I'm rereading the whole thing very slowly as part of the research for my paper for the symposium at the end of August. Will you be there? Not the least extraordinary thing about TBotNS is that it really does get better every time you read. Wish I understood it all, though! Nigel

But if you understood it all, Gene Wolfe would have to kill you. (And if he didn't, then one of us would.) <G> William (the ignorant eclectic) Ansley