Juturna and the skull

maa3208 Jul 2003, 20:21original as archived

One thing has always bothered me about Sev's meeting with Juturna in Urth of the New Sun: she doesn't know about saving him, but indicates that now that she has been told, she will save him in the past and not allow him to drown. Does this imply that the Urth Severian is on at the conclusion of Urth of the New Sun is a different iteration, a different timeline? Has he traveled even further back into the previous cycle of existence? If Juturna never saved him in that past timeline could the skull be his? Then how was he alive to wed Valeria? The multiple lifelines are disturbing. Is there any way that Ash and the Green Man aren't mutually exclusive? If the future Urth is dragged into a past cycle, then one planet can have the green man and the other can have master ash. It is quite clear that in some time-lines Severian is not the New Sun, right? The timelines in which he died as a child? Or is that inconsequential? Marc Aramini

Chris08 Jul 2003, 20:47original as archived

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Ash and the Green Man are only mutually exclusive beyond a certain critical point of... for lack of something better to call it, the "event tree". The discussion Severian has with him indicates some kind of "many worlds" cosmology. Ash comes from an eventual branch of the tree where things do not go well. He is able to travel back anywhere along the path from his eventual end to the beginning, but winks out of existence when he enters any branch of the tree which is not along his world's line. I think this is independent of the question of whether there are multiple iterations of Severian (though as I said I don't think there really are). Chris

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