From: Joel Priddy <jpriddy@saturn.vcu.edu>
Subject: (urth) Early Urth
Date: Fri, 16 May 97 10:10:43 EDT


[Posted from URTH, a mailing list about Gene Wolfe's New Sun and other works]

mantis say:

>>Slow down a second.  You've truncated my point: I didn't write
"earliest days of the White Fountain," I wrote "earliest days of
White Fountain =starlight= on Urth."  You apprehend the
difference, don't you? <<

Yes, I do, and didn't mean to misquote you. I was just having
trouble with my editor, so I couldn't quote you directly. But now
that I'm thinking of it, here's a question regarding the
starlight... Doesn't Severian find that his star is invisible
from outside Dis' orbit when he disembarks from Tzadkiels ship?
This is presumably centuries before the Apu-Incident. Is it just
that a minute amount of starlight, less than the human eye can
pick up is hitting the Urth? But doesn't he see his star with his
eyes when he's Apu? Was his star blocked in the former case? By
the object that caused the eclipse? And Severians connection to
his other self in the form of the White Fountain... does this
"sympathy" work at lightspeed, or is it instantaneous?

mantis say:
>>Re: "The earliest days of the White Fountain's existence
stretch back
to the earliest days of humans on Urth"--does the text support
this
claim?  I can see where Famulimus says, "Thus surprised are we,
Severian, to find you here where men have scarce begun" (V, ch. ,
p.354).  Is that the quote that informed you?<<

Yes, this is the quote I was referring to.

mantis say:
>>"Here where men have scarce begun" can be taken in many ways:
scarce begun civilization, for one example.<<

Yes, I had taken the quote to refer to the earliest days of
civilization. I think (and I'm real shakey on this one) that
someone, maybe the Hierodules talking to Severian in their
stateroom, made a distinction between humans as they are then and
humans when they were little more than beasts. I'm not being much
help to myself by stubbornly refusing to remember the quote, but
it's phrasing led me to believe that the speaker was referrring
to a distinction within homo sapiens sapiens. 

mantis say:
>>FWIW, I have a few factoids that point to that scene taking
place in
Cuzco, South America circa AD 1200.  Of course, this is obviously
based upon the perhaps fatally flawed viewpoint that Urth is
literally an evolved form of Earth after a period of less than
one million years from today!<<

It's certainly built, whole-cloth, from meso-american culture,
although I, personally, didn't take that to mean that it was meso-america any
more than I took the language precedent to what Severian spoke to
actually be Latin. BTW, the structure that Severian built... was
it a dome of true arches, or stepped arches? I believe the
pre-Columbian cultures had the latter, but not the former.


Mantis conclude:
>> (BTW, didn't Ranjit have a separate place for
people to list Wolfe-ish books?)<<

Oops, is there? Sorry about that, then. But just one quick
question before the posting-police descend upon my head: Are the
Harrison books good? Do you recommend them?

-cephalothorax-
(whose penchant for misspelling sometimes even extends to his own
name)