S&C: Claw - Is Gene Wolfe messing with me?

[Jlawrence, S&L Moderator]

The play has kind of mutated echoes of many things that happen in the books before and after its presentation.

The story about the dream son shows the way Earth legends and history have become mutated and mixed-up in Severian's time. The story mixes the myth of Theseus fighting the Minotaur in the labyrinth with the U.S. Civil War naval battle Battle of Hampton Roads, a first battle between ironclad warships, one of them being the USS Monitor. Monitor <--> Minotaur.

Granted, I only picked up on the Theseus part while reading it, the Monitor part I learned from one of the discussions here. But it's pretty fun once you know what's being mixed up.

Severian also refers back to the idea of the giant thumb-print map in one of the later books, I forget when...