From: "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes" 
Subject: (urth) A Point of Order
Date: Mon, 17 Jun 2002 09:03:28 -0700

God does promise Noah that He will not again destroy all the world by 
water.

The coming of the White Fountain does not violate this promise, because
all the world is _not_ destroyed.

If "all the world" means the land masses, then it is not so much destroyed
as rearranged -- if the prophecies of the coming of the New Sun are as 
accurate as they seem to be, the old continents are destroyed and new 
continents arise. Sev winds up on an island in the middle of a vast sea; 
but that's where a continent used to be. You wouldn't expect to find a 
new continent right where the old one was.

If "all the world" means, as it does in many languages (e.g., French 
"tout le monde"), "all the people in the world," then, again, this is
clearly not the case -- we see a few people saved; there is no particular
reason to assume that similar scattered people do not survive all over 
the globe; indeed, though Wolfe's ultraDickensian tenedency toward
plotting-by-coincidence could in fact have Severian run across the
_only_ survivors, combining that with (some of) them also being folks 
he already knows one way or another seems, to me, excessive; more likely
there are a number of survivors and Synchronicity Central brings him to
the ones he knows.

--Blattid
                                    Republicans must always be on guard 
                                against sounding Teutonic. -- P. Noonan


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