Posted from 2 addresses as Jeff Wilson, Jeffery Wilson clueland.com, Jeffery Wilson
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Maybe *Wolfe* likes monkeys are writes about them in preference to the other inconsequentialities that go unrecorded. Why is that?…
29 Jun 2010, 01:30
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They're both. Exultants have greater height genetically, and enhance it further by harvesting hormones or actual glands from their khaibits. This modification for greater height ma…
29 Jun 2010, 01:19
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Maybe Severian likes monkeys so he writes about them in preference to the other inconsequentialities that go unrecorded.…
29 Jun 2010, 00:54
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Is Inire known to travel in time, himself? Or is he the station master? IIRC, there are four characters who may travel in time without artifice: Severian, Juturna, the Green Man, …
28 Jun 2010, 20:00
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I bet they have one hell of a Mardi Gras there.…
28 Jun 2010, 04:03
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I'm not sure this can be a valid controlled experiment other than on the purely genetic level, where technically #5 is the control (no introduced variation) and David would be th…
27 Jun 2010, 20:22
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He may mean all the clones to come, as he is inextricably on the same track as Maitre and his predecessors. He's also probably lying to himself, but at the same time leaving a wr…
24 Jun 2010, 13:04
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I think they are of a race and in league, but not the same person. Ossipago's quite gruff, while Inire's kindly; Ossipago goes where he is needed, Inire holds down the fort. The L…
23 Jun 2010, 21:10
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The only controllers we can confirm are FB&O. Inire is almost certainly one, and some of the squatty, long-armed characters suspected to be him in disguise might be his aquastor pr…
23 Jun 2010, 17:46
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They are like the tactile holograms in various media, particularly the doctor from Star Trek Voyager. They can appear just to one person mentally, or they can be objectively visibl…
23 Jun 2010, 16:35
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It must seem so unfair that they did everything *right* and they still end up getting caught because the mark was superhumanly immune to the invariably fatal avern. Severian bel…
21 Jun 2010, 01:45
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I think the poppet's stretches in the box are not suited to anything like a vertebrate: the bit about smiling when it closes so she can be smiling when it opens indicates her mus…
20 Jun 2010, 17:42
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Perhaps Agilus and Agia are the remnants of a race or a bloodline of sexdoll-people, engender for that purpose and of similar origin as the mastiff-men and the cat women. They lo…
20 Jun 2010, 08:31
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That's not to say that proper motion has no part to play in the Book. it puts a fuzzy upper limit on how many 26,000 year cycles can pass. Starting about 03:30, this episode of C…
20 Jun 2010, 08:14
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Most constallations' component stars have no physical association among them and only appear to lie closely together as seen from Earth. This lack of unity means proper motion wi…
20 Jun 2010, 03:17
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Maybe it's meant to descend from chimera - a creature assembled from parts. And an issue of Typhon, I see!…
20 Jun 2010, 02:59
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Here's a video of a pitcher getting beaned. Right after the crack of the bat, there's a *tok* of the ball-skull collision. IMO the bat's crack is sharper than the skull's *tok* ,…
19 Jun 2010, 16:51
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After many chiliads of racial mixing from mechanized travel, there would be a much smoother distribution of "Asian" features. Severian has seen many people with broad cheekbones…
19 Jun 2010, 15:55
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The Torturers' yearly pageantry employs a woman not seen between times, has an identical appearance over the decades, and engages in the staged artifice of not just surviving but…
19 Jun 2010, 15:24
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Would that be the outfit with Daria, that was going to rob the gold from the mastiff-men's stagecoach?…
19 Jun 2010, 14:52
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Bless you, man. Agia's no saint - I'd say that given her record of sacrilege, multiple murder, and treason, she's about as unsaintly as they come, in a league with Baldanders an…
19 Jun 2010, 14:10
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Gunnie and Idas attack him, but they're not small.…
18 Jun 2010, 21:54
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FWIW, Wikipedia says in Capek's original play the robots are based on a chemical process.…
18 Jun 2010, 08:48
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Dude, top posting and not-trimming quoted material makes the baby Theoanthropos cry. This sounds very much like some folk magic, suggesting Agia is part of a mystery cult. The …
18 Jun 2010, 06:56
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Maybe it's a clue about the wall, rather than her head.…
17 Jun 2010, 16:56
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Perhaps she has a plate in her head? Sev's comments on Jonas indicate that functional prosthetics are not particularly remarkable in the Commonwealth. Or she could just have a s…
17 Jun 2010, 07:22
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The notional translator of the BotNS signs his notes at the end of Volume I as "G.W." G.W. is a fictional Gene Wolfe, very similar to but much less informed than the author. This…
17 Jun 2010, 07:01
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I recall that the green Lune is said to be 50,000 leagues away, which we have generally taken to mean 150,000 miles and indicate that it has moved closer somehow. Maybe instead, …
17 Jun 2010, 05:34
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Welcome to the Monkey House, Ryan! That is some fine animation on your 2009 reel there.…
17 Jun 2010, 05:15
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And yet, Severian was able to cross this continent within a shift worth of air, as I said to IIRC Roy the last time this came around. There's just no consistent detail on the siz…
16 Jun 2010, 11:24
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Between the Age of Myth and Severian's time? Probably at least 2-3. It's the same math as the wall's height vs sight distance; the higher they fly, the more acres of hungry infan…
16 Jun 2010, 03:38
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That's at odds with Wolfe's worldiews and other stories from the period, like "Beautyland". He considered/considers non-Christian societies to be tainted and given to cruelty, an…
15 Jun 2010, 08:47
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Wolfe makes a point of many Earthly species being extinct by Sev's time, and eagles are endangered even today. There could be a similar shortage of the highest flying gesse, perh…
15 Jun 2010, 03:36
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Abaia and Erebus are mentioned as if in league together on several occasions. Perhaps Abaia is the slightly humanlike of the two who marshals the more humanoid forces of the Asci…
14 Jun 2010, 15:41
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There's a distance-to-horizon calculator here: http://boatsafe.com/tools/horizon.htm a 1-mile Wall would be visible for 97.8 statute miles. Perhaps league has an ambiguous mea…
14 Jun 2010, 15:16
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I think it is mad industry to debate the single purpose of the Wall. Even by the standards of Urthly civilization at its height, it must have been a tremendous undertaking beyond…
14 Jun 2010, 09:54
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Are they? Aren't some made from a living person's impression of the subject, rather than from the subject's corpse? How did Severian merge with the meat? I thought it was only a …
14 Jun 2010, 05:27
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okay - so there seems to be a fairly short distance limit on BFO's method of branching off an eidolon, so normally they are only made of dead people for practical and safety reas…
14 Jun 2010, 00:00
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Why couldn't the eidolon stay at the stone town and the strangled meat go back to the future?…
12 Jun 2010, 19:10
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Why would that be bad? Does the trio have some influence over the eidolon of a resurrected Severian that they would not have over the all-meat resurrected Severian?…
12 Jun 2010, 16:13
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? A pedestrian's shadow can lay to the westward in the morning and to the eastward in the evening. Octans, the octant. It doesn't actually form a 45 deg angle now (1/8 of a circ…
12 Jun 2010, 00:48
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They guard the entrances to the Wall's innards as well as serving as gate security, customs, etc. Just like air bases have MPs serving as traffic cops despite writing tickets ha…
11 Jun 2010, 16:14
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Do we know for sure that Typhon built the Whorl, or did he appropriate it the way he did everything else on Urth when he set up his capital there? But those all have plot functio…
11 Jun 2010, 05:39
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Yes, the limerick is not just cute but technically accurate: There was a young lady named Bright Whose speed was much faster than light; She set out one day, In a relative way And…
11 Jun 2010, 00:04
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That's true, but it is still tacking in the sense of rigging the sails at similar angles to get transverse propulsion - and since the speakers are originally educated as wet sai…
10 Jun 2010, 23:46
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The Wall may have been built to hold back the sea itself; the gate tunnels are easily sealed and presumably big, heavy slabs concealed inside can be driven deep into the river's …
10 Jun 2010, 09:31
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That's not entirely correct; if the light is reflected at an angle, it imparts momentum at an angle normal to the reflecting surface. For example if light traveling due north str…
10 Jun 2010, 07:38
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I agree that quote trimming is a very worthy practice, even if digest readers are often the worst offenders.…
10 Jun 2010, 04:36
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Yes, the pro-moderation anarchist, that's me. I didn't see any offlist messages from you, sorry. That's a consequence of the list owner allowing digest mode to the people who ha…
09 Jun 2010, 04:11
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Accelerating up to lightspeed then doing some trick to go FTL is a time-honored SF tradition including STAR WARS and going back at least to _STARMAN JONES_. Okay, a wall obvious…
08 Jun 2010, 05:17
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