From: m.driussi@genie.com
Subject: (urth) Yet more playfulness
Date: Tue, 25 Nov 97 16:24:00 GMT


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

Reply:  Item #8207739 from URTH@LISTS.BEST.COM@INTERNET#

Tony Ellis,

Re: significance of withholding ending.  Absolutely--I mean, even
Severian might balk if he was told up front he would have to =die= on
the ship in order to succeed!

Re: "holiday brochures on Atlantis," well it might be that way, but I
took it more as being a case that Thecla, finding herself on death
row, suddenly got religious and wanted a copy of the bible in a land
that has more or less forgotten the bible.  I assume that she had
received a certain amount of instruction from her tutors, and/or
perhaps her parents (her father died years before, it turns out).

"Briefly, in the time before Ymar was Autarch, when the sun had begun
to cool, there appeared on Urth a man now called the Conciliator, an
intercessor and mediator who healed the sick and attempted to teach
the people; his stories form what is now called THE BOOK OF THE NEW
SUN . . . "

"The fourth book [in the cell with Thecla], as the astute reader will
have guessed long ago, is THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN itself"--Gene
Wolfe, "Books in THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN," PLAN[E]T ENGINEERING p.
15.

=mantis=