{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/1845",
    "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it.  Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.",
    "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'"
  },
  "archive": "urth",
  "thread": {
    "id": 1845,
    "subject": "The Mysteries of Gene Wolfe/\"The Science in Science-Fiction\"",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "1999-10-25T11:33:12+00:00",
    "last": "1999-10-25T11:33:12+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0028-0220@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Alex David Groce",
        "address": "alex_groce at gs246.sp.cs.cmu.edu"
      },
      "date": "1999-10-25T11:33:12+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) The Mysteries of Gene Wolfe/\"The Science in Science-Fiction\"",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Robert Aickman's collection COLD HAND IN MINE (which I strongly recommend to\nall Lupines) opens with a quotation from Sacheverell Sitwell's \"For Want of\nthe Golden City\":  \"In the end it is the mystery that lasts and not the\nexplanation.\"\n\nWhen Wolfe tells us less than everything we want to know he is at his best.\nThe few works in which everything can be explained (away) are, in my opinion,\nhis least successful.  His best works are all saturated by mysteries, some\nsolvable by diligent study of the text, some forever perplexing:  PEACE, BOTNS,\nBOTLS, \"Seven American Nights,\" 5HC, the Soldier books, \"Forlesen,\" etc.  \nOccasionally, Wolfe fails--CASTLEVIEW is the most notable example, where the\nmysteries endure only as a vague \"What the heck was that all about?  I got\nthe Arthur bits, and G. Gordon Liddy, but...?\"  But usually it is precisely\nthis \"frustrating\" narrative coyness that keeps us hooked--and, when the \nmysteries extend beyond the last page, keep the story alive in our minds\nforever.  Had Wolfe ended BOTNS with \"and by the way Severian went and got\na new sun and everything was ok\" or had URTH been anything so simple as that,\nwe would have rightly reevaluated the beauty and importance of what went \nbefore.  By providing us just enough solution to construct the story in our\nown heads and slowly fill in the blank spots of this map but not enough to\neradicate the last land marked \"Here Be Dragons\" or \"The Edge of the World\"\nWolfe manages to create fictions that mirror the knowable but fundamentally\nmysterious nature of experienced reality.  In a sense this is fundamental to\nall story-telling--the essence of story is to ask \"and what happened next?\"\nand (sometimes forgotten, and hardly present in some stories--the latest John\nGrisham novel, etc.) \"what did that mean?\"  The second asked, at least \ninitally, not as literary criticism or symbolic explanation, but within the\ncontext of the story--the hero has a dream, what does this dream portend for\nthe story?  Why does the hero have to kill his father?  The only story that\nevades mystery is the one that tells us the ending on the first page, which,\nof course, in a way Wolfe does in BOTNS!  Wolfe simply raises this art ok\nkeeping the reader (listener) going to very high levels indeed, by making us\n(even after he has quit \"speaking\") ask these questions."
        },
        {
          "kind": "sig",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "It may be that if time-travel does exist, it works somewhat as described in\nBOTNS.  A recent NOVA (that came on when I was expecting Fawlty Towers) had\ninterviews with various pontificating physicists about wormholes, black holes,\nand other SFnal physics, leading up to time-travel.  The new kink (at least\nfor me) was that some physicists, at least the one NOVA was talking to, are\nnow using something that sounds remarkably like fixed-point theory to get rid\nof paradoxes in time-travel.\n\nFixed-point theory is used in many areas of computer science to mathematically\ndefine self-referential functions and data structures.  The idea is that if\nyou keep plugging in the current approximation for the recursively-defined\nthing in the definition then simplifying this and using it as the new \ndefinition, eventually (under certain conditions--there are \"least\" and \n\"greatest\" fixed points which are usually the well-defined ones) you will hit\nupon a solution that does not change when you plug it in to the definition.  A\nsimple example:  Set S = all x such that either (1) x = 1 or (2) x / 2 is an \nelement of S.  If we initially set \"S\" to some group of integers 1-n, the \nfixed-point will be just those integers that are powers of 2.\n\nThe time-travel idea is that whenever a paradox shows up, \"nature\" does the\nsame thing, iterating until a self-consistent solution to the time-travel\ninteractions arises.  The show used billiard-balls to demonstrate this, then\nvarious talking heads said \"it gets more complicated if you introduce free-will\nand human actions, of course,\" but the implication was that it still made\nsense.\n\nSo, perhaps it IS good physics that in BOTNS Severian succeeds because in the\nfuture he did succeed and so the New Sun is on its way, helping him perform the\nvarious \"miracles\" that he needs to perform to bring the New Sun.  Had he\nfailed completely the \"first time\" it might have been a consistent solution,\nbut once he succeeded at all, the lock was in and he was pulled up, in classic\ntime-travel fashion, by his own previous bootstraps.\n\n\n\n\"And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.\" John 8:32\n--\nAlex David Groce (agroce+ at cs.cmu.edu)\nPh.D. Student, Carnegie Mellon University - Computer Science Department\n8112 Wean Hall (412)-268-3066\nhttp://www.cs.cmu.edu/~agroce"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}