From: "Kieran Cleary" <kierannwn@tinet.ie>
Subject: Re: (urth) Time
Date: Mon, 2 Feb 1998 11:14:19 


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

>On the illness of the sun:  It is stated in several places that the sun
>is being devoured by a black hole.  That much is impossible to argue
>with.  The debatable point is whether it's natural causes or murder.

How about this then:

Item: The Conciliator is sometimes referred to as "Dark Sun" (or "Dark Star"
can't remember which.)
Item: The New Sun itself is a White Fountain. This is described in the text
as being the opposite of a black hole, i.e. an erruption of matter from one
(lower) universe to another (higher) universe.
Item: There is a black hole in the Old Sun
Item: The White Fountain that is the New Sun was not born in the same
universe as Urth. (shaky here, but I thought that was mentioned in tUotNS)

So, speculation follows: the black hole that is destroying the Old Sun is
merely the necessary complement to the New Sun. One has caused the other,
and are both different sides of the same coin that is Severian.



North West Labs
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Republic of Ireland

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email: kierannwn@tinet.ie
-----Original Message-----
From: David_Lebling@avid.com <David_Lebling@avid.com>
To: urth@lists.best.com <urth@lists.best.com>
Date: Sunday, February 01, 1998 8:10 PM
Subject: (urth) Time


>
>[Posted from URTH, a mailing list about Gene Wolfe's New Sun and other
works]
>
>What a great flurry of new activity! And some new blood as well. Yumbo!
>
>On the illness of the sun:  It is stated in several places that the sun
>is being devoured by a black hole.  That much is impossible to argue
>with.  The debatable point is whether it's natural causes or murder.  It
>seems pretty clear to me that it was done on purpose to weaken Typhon's
>empire.  The coincidence is too unlikely otherwise.  Who dunnit?  The
>obvious SFnal idea is that it's "the rebels," whomever they might be.
>The unobvious idea is that it's Severian himself, or more generally the
>forces of good.  It's pretty clear that the sort of empire Typhon was
>ruling is one you don't want as a neighbor, so...
>
>On the mountains:  This may just be me reading things into the text that
>aren't there (what! never!), but the mountains are clearly "all" carved
>in the shape of people.  And it isn't just autarchs, either.  You could
>look it up.
>
>On geography, to CRCulver:  The action of the tetralogy takes place in
>South America, and yet there is a great river that flows southwestward
>over a plain, and great mountains to the north and east of the plain.
>This isn't _our_ South America.  Either lots of time has passed (and
>getting serious mountains in that end of SA is going to take a lot of
>time -- the plate tectonics are all going the wrong way), or someone has
>been fiddling.  On the other hand, the statement that such stuff has
>stopped is a pretty strong argument for Deep Time.  Perhaps the same
>technology that reshaped the continents froze them as well -- what a
>nuisance if you get the continents where you want them and they start
>drifting off again!
>
>Tzadkiel and Severian:  Recall that Tzadziel can send slivers of itself
>off as independent beings.  Now we have the suggestion that Severian can
>do the same.  Perhaps Severian _is_ Tzadziel, in that sense?
>
>Deep Time:  The hardest thing to believe about TBOTNS taking place 50
>million years in the future is that _so little_ has changed.  People are
>still people, exactly as they are now.  The average species lasts on the
>order of three million years.  Even with all sorts of advanced
>technology, would 50 million years have changed so little?
>
>Wolfe is a master at making things simultaneously not be what they seem
>and giving clues to the truth.  It's perfectly appropriate that it
>should seem like millions (or even billions) of years have passed, just
>as it seems that we're reading a sword & sorcery story at first.  After
>all, one of many things the book is is an homage to _The Dying Earth_,
>which is pretty clearly science fantasy.  One of Wolfe's goals was to
>make the science fantasy into science fiction.  Vance's book doesn't
>make sense as science fiction, so Wolfe spent a great deal of effort to
>make sense of it.
>
>     -viz
>     (david_lebling@avid.com)
>
works
>*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at
http://moonmilk.volcano.org/urth/
ranjit@best.com
whorl@lists.best.com
>