brief comment

Roy, no big deal, but there IS a scene when he actually is looking at the moon and commenting: "Green came up, bigger and brighter than we ever see it on Blue. Or want to, either." (pg 714 in SFBC BOTSS, chapter 17) He is talking about Lune here. We are saying the same thing. I'm kind of intrigued by the recent idea that Lune could have near urth gravity. But doesn't the fact that at 30,000 leagues Green is still not as big as Lune indicate that Green can't be much bigger? I mean, Lune would have to be really damned close if Green really were larger at all, and it can't be THAT close. Marc Aramini

Marc, I'm afraid that your uncritical acceptance of the 30,000-league figure for Green's distance from Blue may be a bit dangerous; after all, Wolfe's characters make mistakes, conceal the truth, and lie outright all the time. This figure is given at second hand, produced by a culture that's had only one generation of planetside life--the estimate may be influenced by scales within the Whorl, where the skylands are only twice as far away as the Long Sun, and city lights in those regions are evidently visible at night. Likewise Juganu's comment, "We are every- where": we don't know whether it's a self- aggrandizing boast, a calculated statement meant to dishearten his listeners, or an unthinking assumption. Is Juganu even aware of Urth before Horn enlists his help to travel there? Mark Millman (Nacre)

Date: Saturday, April 06, 2002 10:41 PM

"Green came up, bigger and brighter than we ever see it on Blue. Or want to, either." (pg 714 in SFBC BOTSS, chapter 17) He is talking about Lune here. We are saying the same thing. I'm kind of intrigued by the recent idea that Lune could have near urth gravity.<< Please don't get started on that! As mantis has already hinted, if there is any evidence to support that idea, it's extratextual. No scene, directly or indirectly, takes place on Lune in the Urth Cycle, and there's not a word in the text about Lune's gravity.

really damned close if Green really were larger at all, and it can't be THAT close.<< I could offer the feeble excuse that, on the occasion you cited above, Lune had just risen and therefore Urth's atmosphere magnified Hoof's view of it, just as Moon looks bigger near the horizon than at zenith on Earth, and Hoof had limited occasions to observe relative sizes, but I don't know that that would be sufficient reason for his blanket statements that Lune appears larger than Green. Silkhorn's statement, cited earlier, that implied there wasn't much difference in size between Blue and Green, coupled with these recent arguments that seem to indicate that Green must be close in size to Lune, leads to the conclusion that all three bodies are about the same size. Add to that my observations about the problems a much higher gravity on Blue would present for the inhumi, and where does that lead to?: That Blue and Green are about the same size and have about the same gravity, and both correspond to the size and gravity of Lune. That Blue is therefore the size of Lune, which means that Blue can't possibly be Urth. That Silkhorn & Co. woke up on Urth and just didn't notice that they weighed six times as much as they were used to. No, I can't account for the apparent discrepancies in the text, or the apparent violations of the laws of physics. I just don't see any good reason to believe that Blue is Urth/Ushas. I can't endorse your theories about trees/inhumi/Neighbors/people either, but I will concede that there is something odd going on wrt trees in the SS series--I just don't know what. Here's one you haven't mentioned before. Near the end of the second chapter of RTTW, Pig is seized by both fear and wonder when he discovers that he is in the midst of a wood but can't touch a tree or be touched by one. It is his proximity to Silkhorn that seems to account for it, but he doesn't know that. -Roy

Could this be that he's following Silkhorn, who is using his Neighbor-given ability to find paths through bushes? Although it's possible that this works because the trees are moving to make a path for Horn, the way it's described in the text it seems more like some sort of extraordinary perception Horn has that enables him to see the one clear path that most people can't find. -Rostrum