From: "Tony Ellis" <tellis@futurenet.co.uk>
Subject: (urth) Re: Divine Weak
Date: 3 Dec 1997 15:10:14 +0100


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

                                                                      =
03/12/97
                                                                      =
14:17
 RE>Divine Weak

Apologies to everyone for those <equals>3D" pustules which littered
my last message. I don't know where they came from but I'll try not
to use the <equals> key again until I find out.

Mantis wrote:
>Re: Divine Week, again, let me stress that this is the most
>speculative bit. 

Understood.

>It arose from my having "discovered" the patterns
>of four and five segments in TBOTNS/URTH as hologrammically
>reproduced (or anticipated) by most of the stories from the brown
>book

This sounds intriguing. If you can put up with more of my remorseless
blinkered scepticism I would love to hear the argument behind your
theory.

>Here is another general statement about E&G: I don't think it is as
>much an unconscious blending of various and sundry eschatologies and
>genesises; rather I think it is a self-aware, self-conscious
>eschatology and genesis that remembers (or whose audience remembers)
>all the earlier stories (as well as our post-modern concepts of
>evolutions and extinctions) and now makes them equally valid and somehow
>sequential--this is the umpteenth eschatology and genesis in a long
>series.

Here I am much happier to go along with you. The composite stories
from the Brown Book read as if they have accidentally blended 
together (The Jungle Book + The Founding of Rome etc) over the eons,
but the play seems more knowing. Hardly surprising, perhaps, given 
that it was written by the wily, highly erudite Dr Talos. He seems to
posses an almost encyclopedic knowledge of past human culture:
not only is he familiar with the "lost" Book of the New Sun, but he's =
read
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein too!