{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/3108",
    "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": 3108,
    "subject": "for Dan'l: why Blue=Urth?",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "2002-03-30T02:55:26+00:00",
    "last": "2002-03-30T02:55:26+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0203-513@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "maa32",
        "address": "maa32 at dana.ucc.nau.edu"
      },
      "date": "2002-03-30T02:55:26+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) for Dan'l: why Blue=Urth?",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Dan'l asked why the scheme I have proposed for trees must include blue as \nurth.\nFor me, it makes better use of the trees: they serve as creators instead of \nshadowy figures that just lurk there.  If blue is urth, it explains the wall \nseawrack sees under the sea as Nessus' wall, it explains how the trees on the \nmoon evolved and killed the colonists there, eventually returning to Urth to \nsee it wiped out.  In other words, it presents a whole future history and \njives up all those little points like Hoof calling Lune Green, and lets us \nunderstand how the old Scylla could know where the new Scylla had sent \nSeawrack.  Note that the saltier sea and the darker lighting of Urth as \nopposed to Blue are rectified by the coming of the new sun, making it the same \nas Blue's setting, and making those comments actually important.  It makes \nsymbolic sense of the Hoof going on and on about making an anchor in that \nchapter with the travel: an anchor keeps you in one place.  With time travel, \nwe can explain how Silk will show up in Inclito's mother's story: in one of \nhis dreams.  The trees and their instant speciation provide for the changes \nevolutionarily from men to neighbors: they have appeared before, and they are \nreborn with the colonists.  It explains why they come back: the trees make a \nnew generation from Horn's DNA after he falls into the pit (on an island of \ntrees). Why would they respect Horn otherwise?  He is like their father - it \nexplains why they like him.  If the neighbors have time-bending properties (or \nthe trees)then we can reconcile the two big green and blue planets as one and \nshow how man will eventually become the green man (and it matches the green \nman's own access to the corridors of time).  There are just too many \nsimilarities (like the distances) to completely ignore, no matter how many \nporblems Gene throws in there.  Also,Krait says the biggest puzzles are the \nmost obvious ones.  This really stuck with me for some reason.  The absolute \nbiggest puzzle is how the heck Blue could be Urth, even though so many of the \nthings are the same about it.  In other words, I would be overlooking a lot of \nlittle clues if I simply said the trees where completely alien trees that had \nnothing to do with the terraforming of Lune.  And if they don't \"make\" \nvanished people, then why are they the gods of the vanished people, and what \ndo they have to do with them?  And if they do make vanished people, then I \nhave proposed a hybridizing mechanism that will produce them.  In other words, \nI don't know what to do with the trees except to try to mold them into the \nmythos of Lune and to provide a means for the rationalization of the changes \nin the animal life of urth and to reconcile the obvious time \"paradox\": you \ncan't go to Blue and Urth at the same time if they are the same place - I \nthink this is the big paradox that Krait is foreshadowing.  I think Gene put \nin all these little clues that hint that Blue is Urth but then totally screwed \nus over with the ambiguous math of the system.  Perhaps you can't ever \ndetermine with 100% certainty that blue is urth, but you can sure try like \nhell and seem to make some progress towards it using the clues in the book.\n\n Later, a multi-limbed vanished person jumps out of the sea who Horn claims \nmight be immortal.  First I thought this was Severian, who was under the sea \nand got eaten by a tree.  Horn indicates that we can should try to figure out \nwhat was really going on there; but we don't have enough information about \nsomebody who could be \"favored by their gods with immortality\" unless we can \napply Urth to it: Severian.  This is right after he realizes that the island \nhe was just on was made entirely of trees covered with things like lianas, in \nChapter 6 of OBW. \"I do not know how such a monstrous thing came to be, but I \nhave thought about it again and again, and at last settled on the explanation \nthat I offer here.  If you find a better one, I congratulate you.\" (94 SFBC).  \nThis sounds like Wolfe making a meta-textual statement: I present this \nsolution, but can you find another plausible one I have have designed into the \ntext?  He does this a lot with the location of Urth and Blue as well: Silk \nsays don't look at his words, he wishes he could make you see that the sky \nfeels like the same sky. (I'm looking for that exact quote now in Return to \nthe Whorl, but it is evading me).\n\nAnother bit of evidence supporting that inhuma are kind of like trees is that \nyou can bury them and they won't die.\n\nHere is the trees that are eating trees section: \"Green is great in the sky.  \nLike th eye of a devil, people say; but the truth for me is that it is so \nlarge that I look up at it and think on other days, and fancy sometimes that I \ncan smell the rot, and see the trees that are eating trees that are eating \ntrees.  I never hear the wild song of the wind without recalling other days \nstill. ... Time is a sea greater than our sea.  You knew that long before I \nwent away.  I have learned it here.  Its tides batter down all walls, and what \nthe tides of time batter down is never rebuilt.  Not larger.  Not smaller.  \nNever as it was.\" (92)SFBC OBW Chapter 6 Seawrack.  The green is lune \nhypothesis explains the skeletons of Silk's \"friends\" on Green in the tower \nfar away from all other human access: they are the colonists of Lune who held \nout in their stronghold against the strange life they had made to adapt to \nLune, which began to take on their attributes.  This is where the neighbors \ngot space technology, then came to earth.\n\nI think that we aren't making full use of the trees if we don't apply the \nplant hybridization theme to them - and I think that lets us rationalize the \nappearance of new species on the planet.  In any case, the descriptions of the \nvanished people indicate that they exist in a different sort of place - \nperhaps that difference could include a time differential.  This is my \nquestion - why are we so opposed to the ability of the vanished people to \ntravel through time, when they can obviously come whenever they want from \n\"somewhere else\"?  Isn't time travel the best solution?  If it's a higher \ndimension, doesn't that entail some kind of power over time in our dimension, \nanyway?\n\nI don't know if this makes any sense ... it just seems like the trees work as \na real key to allow blue to be urth.\nMarc Aramini"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}