Subject: (urth) (TBOTN) Utter speculation

From: Craig Brewer <cnbrewer at yahoo.com>
Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2003 17:47:44 +0000

I've been thinking about the Wall of Nessus and
Baldander's assertion (ch. 35 of Shadow) that the open
space inside the walls wasn't for Nessus' expansion.
But something about the sheer size and height of the
walls made me wonder how far off it would be to
suggest that Nessus wasn't always a city but that it
was initially (possibly) one huge space pad. Assuming
that the walls are circular, then would it be possible
that what we have is some kind of base for a huge
cylinder, like...the Whorl?

Now this would be a rather insane (and, as far as I
can tell) rather impossible way to build and "launch"
a ship as big as the Whorl (which seems to be too
massive to ever be "launched" from a planet).
Still...why is the wall miles high and spread so far
around the city?

If someone can easily disabuse me of this idea, please
do so since it's captured my easily distracted
imagination.

Craig

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From: Michael Andre-Driussi <mantis at siriusfiction.com>
Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2003 18:13:58 +0000

>do so since it's captured my easily distracted

Sorry, no diabusing from me!  I'll just spur you on -- you haven't gone far
enough yet!  (Well except for the Whorl lifting off from Urth; I'll agree
that seems unlikely.)

Fact: the Walls pre-date the city.

Fact: the city has been crawling upstream for a long time, so it has
presumably entered the walls and taken up residence like a hermit crab
moving into a found shell.

Fact: the citadel pre-dates the city, and the earliest name we have for it
is the Old Port, iirc.  So it probably was one of the ports from which
people and materials where shuttled up to the Whorl (and that was
relatively late in history -- the city was . . . approaching, but not there
yet?  The necropolis was for the military people based at the Old Port --
it was a military point); it was definitely a dumping ground for old
worthless ships.

As for the why, who knows?  Gene Wolfe might not even know.  It is a Big
Dumb Object that is an Enigma, with echos of the Tower of Babel and skiffy
notions like a failed sky-elevator, or a blast-containment area for ships
with radioactive exhaust, or a simple terrarium-type structure (an early
Trantor-style "world building" module?) that never got its Buckydome roof,
or just a super "particle accelerator."  IIRC it is a feature of the dying
sun fictions (if not even the gothic before it?) to have gigantism like
this.

=mantis=

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From: James Jordan <jbjordan4 at cox.net>
Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2003 18:23:53 +0000

>cylinder, like...the Whorl?

         I thought the Whorl was a hollowed out asteroid, thus made in 
space. But the rest of your suggestion makes some sense. Even ordinary 
rockets blasting off might require a high wall, to stop noise pollution if 
nothing else. Typhon would have launched a LOT of ships to populate and 
supply Whorl. (But maybe we're both forgetting something.)
         An awful thought just hit me: Doesn't *Starship Troopers* start 
off in Buenos Aires? Naw, it can't be. Nessus is the city of Borges, not of 
Heinlein.

Nutria

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From: James Jordan <jbjordan4 at cox.net>
Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2003 18:29:01 +0000

At 01:13 PM 6/19/2003, you wrote:

   IIRC it is a feature of the dying
>sun fictions (if not even the gothic before it?) to have gigantism like

I believe it's Lewis Mumford who points out that the building of huge 
buildings and monuments is an aspect of the last and dying phase of a 
strong culture. An active and growing culture does not take the time to 
build such things to its own glory. Another version of Parkinson's Law: 
"The efficiency of an organization is in inverse proportion to the depth of 
carpet pile in its headquarters' offices."
         But I'm inclined to think the wall is a huge blast shield of some 
sort.

FWIW

Nutria

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From: James Wynn <the.wynns at usa.net>
Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2003 19:42:13 +0000

Michael Andre-Driussi said:
> yet?

Crush responds:
If it's older name was "the Old Port", then there ought to be a "New Port".
But the new port wouldn't be called that. It would be given a jazzier name.
Just as when the state builds a new highway it's called the Typhon W. Rex
Memorial highway or whatever and the old highway is called "Old Thrax Rd."

So maybe they didn't launch to the Whorl from there. Or maybe they did.

-- Crush

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From: Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <katbarx at hotmail.com>
Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2003 18:42:09 +0000

>>= "Craig wrote this."
>= "Mantis wrote this."

> >Assuming

>Still...why is the wall miles high and spread so far

While I like much of your and Mantis's) ideas here, I'm pretty
sure that Nessus is more than a thousand years old and so
predates Typhon and the _Whorl_. (In fact, I think it's
_much_ more, but I can't recall a cite at present to prove
it.)

> >Still...why is the wall miles high and spread so far

I suspect that the Wall was originally built to contain damage in the
event of a crash (something Mantis tosses off below). It would be
miles high to limit the escape of hazardous materials (radioactives,
alien life spores, etc.) on the wind.

Pondering: There are a few things of BDO scale in the NS books. Some
of them are alive. Is there any connection between them and the
nonliving ones? Could the Wall (despite my, I think, convincing theory
above) have anything to do with them? Probably not; a wall isn't necessary
to keep them "out" since they can't walk abroad on land.

>moving into a found shell.

Question: Do we know that the Walls form a closed ... circle, or whatever?
Or are they open to the Sea? Or extend out into it? I don't recall Sev.
mentioning passsing through them as he comes up the river on _Samru_,
but my memory could well be faulty in this. Anyone recall such a thing?

H'mmm. If they aren't fully closed, that blows off the "containment" theory,
doesn't it?

>is the Old Port, iirc.

The Citidel was clearly the old spaceport, yeah.  I mean, that's why the
Towers are old spaceships, neh?

>So it probably was one of the ports from which

Umm, no. The towers were already towers in Typhon's time, if I'm not
totally mistaken; they take Sev to the Matachin in UotNS, don't they? I'm
pretty sure it's not a port anymore at that point. H'mm: does anyone
recall whether the city is surrounding the Citadel yet at that point? Or if
there's any indication?

>sun fictions (if not even the gothic before it?) to have gigantism like

Yes ... Aside from Vance, the other major "dying Earth" work would be
Aldiss' _Hothouse_, which has its share of biological gigantism -- the 
world-
banyan, the spiders that web the Earth to the Moon ...

Hey, now. It occurs to me, going waaaaaaaaaaay back to certain theories
about trees. Could _Short Sun_ (and especially Green) be related to
Aldiss' book in a way similar to _New Sun_'s relationship to Vance's?

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From: Andy Robertson <andywrobertson at clara.co.uk>
Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2003 20:08:20 +0000

AND Hodgson's THE NIGHT LAND is of course rife with giganticism, with an
eight-mile-tall arcology with hundred-mile-deep sublevels,  mile-tall
Watchers, giant Slugs, screaming mountains, fifty-mile-deep canyons in the
Earth, and so forth.

I think the Walls are ancient "starship-level" technology, but I suspect
they were built as part of the war aganst Abia.   Maybe they were a dyke
aganst inundation.  Maybe once Nessus WAS the entire Republic.

    hartshorn

----- Original Message -----
From: "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes" <katbarx at hotmail.com>

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From: matthew.malthouse <matthew.malthouse at guardian.co.uk>
Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2003 07:33:30 +0000

>cylinder, like...the Whorl?

I can think of two mundane reasons for the space inside the wall.

First to enclose farming land or other resources.  That actually doesn't 
stand up very well because a technology that could build the wall is 
unlikely to be menaced by a purely ground based attack to the concept of 
"wall" is redundant unless there was more too it (speculations about 
forcefield domes have been made here in the past).

The second, and I think more logical potential reason is that the open 
space within the wall is a killing ground - a space left bare to provide 
the forces within the wall an unobstructed field of fire.

Such can be seen around fortifications built in our history but usually 
outside the walls so why a killing ground _inside_ the walls of Nessus.

Nessus - or rather the Citadel - is a space port; we might infer an 
important one.  If it's the point of entry for cacogens or humans 
returning from the empire it's an obvious danger zone and one might well 
want to keep affective guns trained on it.  Thus Nessus isn't "within" the 
wall but "outside it, the wall enclosing the rest of the world.

There's nothing I can recall to directly support this but consider that 
Nessus once much smaller; had the space port / Citadel to it's north while 
now the Citadel is in the southern inhabited reaches of the city.  My 
impression was always that the circle formed by the wall was centered on 
the Citadel - again, no recalled evidence - and that the presence of 
Nessus, the city, was actually unrelated to the existence of the wall.

If that's credible then one should ask why the prohibition remains long 
after it ceased to be meaningful.  One reason is the inertia such things 
have, law become custom and the Commonwealth seems riddled with such. 
Another is that as Nessus grew from a seaport to a great metropolis, the 
largest concentration of people and thus trouble in the realm, subsequent 
Autarchs might have appreciated the wisdom of not having the rabble wash 
up right to the foot of the fortifications.

Oh, and as for the Whorl I'm fairly sure Marble describes being ferried up 
to it with an implication that it was constructed in orbit.

Matthew

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From: matthew.malthouse <matthew.malthouse at guardian.co.uk>
Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2003 07:53:10 +0000

>If it's older name was "the Old Port", then there ought to be a "New 
Port".

"earliest name _we_ have for it" Which we get on Severian's misplaced 
return in time.

"Old" can simply mean it's been there a long time. By then it's redundant, 
the ships have been grounded so long walls have been built between them 
but it's know not have been a port and thet they are ships; something not 
immediately obvious to the people in TBotNS.

If you must have a comparative perhaps the sea/river port that is Nessus 
is "new"; at least it was still active in Severians time(s).

Matthew

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