Subject: (urth) Maybe it's not a black hole

From: Michael Straight <straight at email.unc.edu>
Date: Wed, 01 Dec 1999 13:31:50 +0000

On Wed, 1 Dec 1999, mark millman wrote:

> Regrettably, it seems that Wolfe was using science obsolete even at
> the time of his writing when he came up with the White Fountain
> idea.  (This is the part of UotNS I perhaps like least.)  There had 
> been a theory that the energy absorbed by black holes was some-
> how shunted into other dimensions or universes via what came to
> be known as wormholes, but the "missing" energy was adequately 
> accounted for when the polar X-ray jets that black holes emit were 
> discovered.  We know that the White Fountain was meant to be 
> the output of a black hole from another universe from Severian's
> experiences in Yesod--I believe (though I'm not sure, and I don't 
> have the book here to check) that Apheta tells him how the White
> Fountain is to work.  

Does Apheta or anyone else use the words "black hole" to describe the
other end of the White Fountain or the thing eating away at the sun?

Perhaps there is some other phenomenon, unknown to 20th century
astronomers because it doesn't emit jets of x-rays, that is not a black
hole but is a rift between universes where energy is sucked out of one
universe and emerges as a White Fountain in the other.

-Rostrum

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

---

From: mark millman <millman at us.ncipher.com>
Date: Wed, 01 Dec 1999 14:39:12 +0000

At 01:31 PM 01-12-99 -0500, Rostrum (Michael Straight) wrote:

> Does Apheta or anyone else use the words "black hole" 
> to describe the other end of the White Fountain or the 
> thing eating away at the sun?
>
> Perhaps there is some other phenomenon, unknown to 
> 20th century astronomers because it doesn't emit jets of 
> x-rays, that is not a black hole but is a rift between uni-
> verses where energy is sucked out of one universe and 
> emerges as a White Fountain in the other.

Of course nobody uses the term "black hole"--it would ruin Wolfe's
carefully crafted diction.  But the "worm gnawing at the heart of 
the sun" and the description of the White Fountain that Severian gets
in Yesod--not to mention the discussion on this list--make it pretty 
likely that black holes and their associated phenomena are what 
Wolfe had in mind when he was writing.  

Besides, this is science fiction.  While you are certainly free to believe 
what you please about possible future discoveries in cosmology, I'm
addicted to the idea that the best writers will use established science
in making their extrapolations.  Your statement requires Wolfe to 
have created a new form of astronomical event from whole cloth,
while to me, and based on the evidence that I saw, Occam's Razor 
suggests that Wolfe was working from an obsolete model of the 
structure and behavior of black holes.

And at 9:58 AM 01-12-99 Tony Ellis wrote:

> But there is. We've been down this road before. Right 
> at the very end of The Shadow of the Torturer, Jonas 
> tells the story of the woman who comes back with 
> space with a handful of magic beans, and threatens to 
> throw them into the ocean.
>
> Erebus and friends aren't genetically modified humans 
> like Baldanders, they're alien lifeforms. That grow.

Well, could be.  But they could also be people who have returned from
the stars, with changes.  They could be kind of like Typhon and the ex-
ultants, only less human(e) (or not, who knows?) still.  After all, beans 
come from Earth, or Urth, too.

Mark Millman