STL interstellar empires

Le Guin's main sf work has been set in a common STL interstellar culture. One of the things that is suggested if not stated outright is that it is only possible because they use an instantaneous communication device -- the famed "ansible" (notoriously an anagram of "lesbian," for whatever one can make of that factoid). One of the other devices to knit the metaculture together is "mindspeech," a sort of telepathy which can be learned (iirc). Gene Wolfe certainly read THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS and THE DISPOSSESSED, and it seems highly probable that he read the other novels, too (PLANET OF EXILE and ROCANNON'S WORLD and CITY OF ILLUSIONS) as well as the short stories set in that background. In TBOTNS, at the Vancean resurrection of the Stone Town, the Cumaean uses a device to contact an entity 22 light years away for a real-time conversation. This is rather a lot like an ansible. So the technology is at least possible in the universe of Briah. Typhon just wants to rule a Le Guin style interstellar grouping. Typhon does not seem to have kept all eggs in one basket -- he hedges his bets. The library, according to the story, was a hedge he set up: originally he was going to burn all the books that had been collected. But at the last minute he came up with the hedge, just in case the empire thing didn't work out. So why the Whorl? Another hedge, I say. While all the other stuff is conquer and control, this other project will be "pure" colonization.

See above.

<Use of Latin in Nessus.> <shrug>

It could be that he thought they were decadent, non-natural, time-safari captures, and/or extrasolarian in origin.

Hard to get parts in such a low-tech backwater. Look at Jonas, for example: repaired with biological material, for goodness sake! Urth is far more resource poor than the Whorl, and look at how the chems are running down on the Whorl, after only a few hundred years of isolation. Of course you are free to your own opinion. =mantis=

mantis writes:

Sure, all this cool stuff is available to non-Urthians, and quite likely to New Sun Typhon, but there's no hint that it's anywhere on the Whorl. I suppose you could say it's there, but unused, given Typhon's premature demise. But I don't think New Sun Typhon would be satisfied with a STL empire. Doesn't he say somewhere that he and his followers returned from the stars? If I've got that right, did they come back frozen in a slow-boat? Does this story of his return really square very well with Roger's description of Typhopn's rise in IGJ? In Claw (?) Typhon talks of delaying his decision to leave Urth too long - was he planning to freeze himself on a slow-boat? is his digital presence on the Whorl a kind of poor-man's alternative? Obviously, all of these things which look like mis-matches to me can be glued together, but I think it needs some fairly sticky chewing gum to do it.

But at some point the :"real" Typhon is going to want to take control - what's the point of having even an empire if you don't get to rule it? Will he have to assert his authority over his digital avatar via ansible? Of course, you can postulate some kind of built-in thingy giving real Typhon authority over digital Pas, but I don't find it very convincing.

I think in New Sun it's made clear that Latin is used as to translate some unknown archaic language. Maybe the terms "Latin" and "French" are used similarly in Short Sun, but I don't think so. The texts in the Chras writing are from our broad era; I assume that the languages are also.

I don't understand this point. If Typhon can stock the Whorl with many thousands of chem soldiers, why does he not use them on Urth? Perhaps they were intended just for the Whorl, but again I find this quite dubious. Why should it be so?