Quote:
Originally Posted by Astromancer
Following on my last post, I'm reminded of the Cultural Skepticism which was part of The Book of the New Sun. The levitating castle was assumed to be just a big balloon. Scientific marvels were assumed to be crude tricks. Automatically denying wonders is just as bad as always inserting unreal ones.
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Eh, I don't think it is quite a cultural thing in NEW SUN, more of a sub-cultural thing among the torturers of Severian's era and perhaps shared with certain of the other service guilds. They are inclined to be scientifically minded due to their teaching by Master Palaemon who has access to the best stocked but indifferently curated library in the human universe, and it is in the nature of their work where they get to know the fallible human grasp on truth and fancies, and how important it is to tell between them.
Now about that levitating "castle": I think you mean the cathedral of the Pelerines in the first book. Actually, Severian seems to think it is as solid as a castle or more, because he is used to living in a tower that is actually a grounded rocketship whose armored hull forms part of the defensive wall of the Autarch's citadel. The other tower-ships are joined with smooth slabs advanced metal that remains uneroded from its construction a thousand years ago, so that when his the runaway horse carriage strikes another smooth, shiny wall at full mad gallop he is expecting to die, but does not. He only writes that the wall parted like the fabric of a dream, and the energy of the collision is instead expended in the destruction of an altar inside.
It's only books later that enough details accumulate to indicate the Pelerines are an order of wandering care-giving nuns who live in tents much like a MASH unit that it begins to dawn on some readers that the floating cathedral may "really" have been more like a big top revival-sized circus tent lit from within and then from underneath as the overturned candles ignited the straw and the wooden debris from the altar, creating a thermal plume to loft it into the air before it was itself consumed, vanishing into a shower of sparks.
So for Severian, the miracle is not a flying building which he has lived in for his whole life after all, but that such a huge temporary structure should just happen to be there at the right time to save his life and provide him with a powerful talisman before literally vanishing into thin air. In the Citadel, no new construction is permitted and rights-of-way must be kept uncluttered to allow free movement of troops and artillery, leading to people building inns in trees and taking up cobblestones from alleys at night to hide the appearance of a new wall. He knows a geat deal, but hasn't actually seen a tent before, has no way to describe the difference of that kind as different from any other difference between ancient buildings.