From: "Mitchell A. Bailey" <MAB@lindau.net>
Subject: Re: All You Zombies...Re: (urth) Re: When Did You Last See Your Father?
Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 11:54:22 

Mitchell A. Bailey wrote:
> 
> Kieran Cleary wrote:
...The
> > child in the basket was his mother.<
> >
> > I like that as a possibility, but for this to work, Catherine needs to get
> > whipped back through the corridoors of time in order to meet Oeuen (sp?) so
> > that she can conceive Sev....
> If we buy the idea that the new baby is Catherine, Sev becomes one of
> those  "All You Zombies.." type casualty-loop casualties with no
> ancestry and no beginning!
...
> Recall previous discussions about parallels of episodes in Severian's
> adventures with the life of Christ (e.g. the Temptation, Typhon as
> Tempter). Could this be the parallel to the Virgin Birth?
...

Whoops! This is what I get for getting impulsive just before
staff-meeting time. I realize that the idea is still at this point full
of holes in that Sev would need to be the sole ancestor of Dorcas and
"Charon" [Dorcas' brokenhearted elderly widower in the boat dragging the
Lake of Birds in the Garden of Endless Sleep, Sev's grandfather] and in
turn their ancestors. 
Heinlein, you will recall, solved the dilemma in "All You Zombies.."
with a very rare hermaphroditism/sex change(call it Tieresias'
Syndrome?), but of course the protagonist came from nowhere anyway, so
why not?

Perhaps if it can be shown that all Sev's male ancestors were ultimately
himself, he could still have one or more female ancestors, e.g. Dorcas,
and the Casualty-Loop=Miraculous-Conception model might still hold,
since of course the Virgin Mary came of a conventional ancestry. 

Any clues re "Charon's" parents?


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