Subject: (urth) "been teaching literature for over 35 years"

From: Jeff Wilson <jwilson at clueland.com>
Date: Thu, 05 Sep 2013 21:52:50 +0000

Paul Cook has a ranty go at books he doesn't consider SF, including BOTNS.
He considers the presence of medieval and Arthurian tropes with poor sfnal
world building like the Urth failing to wobble from the lack of a moon
(!!) to be false advertising.

http://amazingstoriesmag.com/2013/09/science-fiction-science-fiction/

Alas, the site editor has blocked comments after a torrent of
coutner-ranting, but has offered to publish a suitably impersonal
counter-column submission.

Would anyone like to join me in compiling some quotes and citations that
poke holes in some of his underinformed opinions?

in particular:

 - there's no moon, so the earth should wobble
 - vulcanism has ceased
 - mountain raising (tectonics) has ceased
 - extreme antiquity (millions or billions of years)
 - subduction zones have stopped removing carbon from the atmosphere
 - events in vast antiquity not referred to, antiquity "not used"
 - "Book Two has a long fairy tale inserted in the middle of the novel
that goes absolutely nowhere and adds nothing to the novel"

It would be best to stick to the original 4 volumes and the pre-Urth
short-stories if we can.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - < jwilson at clueland.com >
A&M Texarkana Computational Intelligence Lab
< http://www.tamut.edu/cil >

---

From: David Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net>
Date: Thu, 05 Sep 2013 22:29:33 +0000

"No moon"? Am I missing something?

Also, this guy has written nothing I've ever heard of. I did find this, 
however:

http://www.teleread.com/chris-meadows/sf-writer-paul-cook-warns-of-science-fictions-infection-by-girl-cooties/

---

From: Christopher Simon <kierkegaurdian at gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 05 Sep 2013 22:36:06 +0000

"Bujold tips her hand in the eloquence of her language (normally a good thing) and the attention to detail that only women would find attractive: balls, courts, military dress, palace intrigues, gossiping, and whispering in the corridors."

Kinda sexist too, isn't he?

-----Original Message-----
From: "Jeff Wilson" <jwilson at clueland.com>
Sent: ?9/?5/?2013 5:52 PM
To: "urth at urth.net" <urth at urth.net>
Subject: (urth) "been teaching literature for over 35 years"

in particular:

_______________________________________________
Urth Mailing List
To post, write urth at urth.net
Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20130905/bba52f34/attachment.htm>

---

From: David Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net>
Date: Thu, 05 Sep 2013 22:42:48 +0000

Here's another gem:

"(Let’s set aside the morality of investing our interest in a character 
who tortures people. Remember, the violence in Wolfe is partially 
influenced by the overt violence in the early 1980s of Orson Scott Card. 
*Card’s touch is everywhere in these books.*)"

On 9/5/2013 6:36 PM, Christopher Simon wrote:
> "Bujold tips her hand in the eloquence of her language (normally a 
> good thing) and the attention to detail that only women would find 
> attractive: balls, courts, military dress, palace intrigues, 
> gossiping, and whispering in the corridors."
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> From: Jeff Wilson <mailto:jwilson at clueland.com>
> To: urth at urth.net <mailto:urth at urth.net>

---

From: Urth <jordonflatourth at gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 05 Sep 2013 23:26:49 +0000

I haven't posted to the list in a long while, but reading this made me spit coffee all over the keyboard, in hilarity and horror.  "...a long fairy tale inserted inserted into the middle of the novel that goes nowhere and adds absolutely nothing..."

I pity anyone with him as a professor.  I hope they all read this blog post.

Sent from my iPad

On Sep 5, 2013, at 3:42 PM, David Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net> wrote:

> Here's another gem:
> 
> "(Let’s set aside the morality of investing our interest in a character who tortures people. Remember, the violence in Wolfe is partially influenced by the overt violence in the early 1980s of Orson Scott Card. *Card’s touch is everywhere in these books.*)"
>

---

From: Craig Brewer <cnbrewer at yahoo.com>
Date: Fri, 06 Sep 2013 00:41:56 +0000

I've been teaching literature for over 15 years, and suddenly I feel very confident in my abilities....

________________________________
 From: Urth <jordonflatourth at gmail.com>
To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net> 
Sent: Thursday, September 5, 2013 5:26 PM
Subject: Re: (urth) "been teaching literature for over 35 years"

Sent from my iPad

On Sep 5, 2013, at 3:42 PM, David Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net> wrote:

>> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net/
> 
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net/
_______________________________________________
Urth Mailing List
To post, write urth at urth.net
Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20130905/456f1e39/attachment.htm>

---

From: Christopher Simon <kierkegaurdian at gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 06 Sep 2013 01:23:20 +0000

I highly doubt Cook actually read BOTNS. He seems to have barely skimmed, picked a few elements, and gone nuts. Seriously, how can you miss the etymological root of "Lune"? Makes me think he didn't read enough to see it mentioned.

-----Original Message-----
From: "Urth" <jordonflatourth at gmail.com>
Sent: ?9/?5/?2013 7:27 PM
To: "The Urth Mailing List" <urth at lists.urth.net>
Subject: Re: (urth) "been teaching literature for over 35 years"

Sent from my iPad

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20130905/0f71f67e/attachment.htm>

---

From: aaron <aaronsingleton at gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 06 Sep 2013 01:41:55 +0000

Saw this first on facebook.  After I read the article and realized the
comments were closed, I left a comment on David Langford's FB post linking
to it.  In my comment I mentioned this person's inaccurate assumption that
there is no moon in the New Sun world.  The fact that it's green makes this
person's comments even funnier.  And Orson Scott Card?  Please.

On Thu, Sep 5, 2013 at 9:23 PM, Christopher Simon
<kierkegaurdian at gmail.com>wrote:

>  I highly doubt Cook actually read BOTNS. He seems to have barely
> skimmed, picked a few elements, and gone nuts. Seriously, how can you miss
> the etymological root of "Lune"? Makes me think he didn't read enough to
> see it mentioned.
>  ------------------------------
> Sent: 9/5/2013 7:27 PM
> I haven't posted to the list in a long while, but reading this made me
> spit coffee all over the keyboard, in hilarity and horror.  "...a long
> fairy tale inserted inserted into the middle of the novel that goes nowhere
> and adds absolutely nothing..."
>
> >> "Bujold tips her hand in the eloquence of her language (normally a good
> thing) and the attention to detail that only women would find attractive:
> balls, courts, military dress, palace intrigues, gossiping, and whispering
> in the corridors."
> >>
> >> Sent: 9/5/2013 5:52 PM

-- 
Aaron Singleton
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20130905/d1469f47/attachment-0001.htm>

---

From: Jerry Friedman <jerry_friedman at yahoo.com>
Date: Fri, 06 Sep 2013 04:37:26 +0000

You left out the best part of that quotation.

"But the romance elements creep in very early on. Bujold tips her hand in
 the eloquence of her language (normally a good thing) and the attention
 to detail that only women would find attractive: balls, courts, 
military dress, palace intrigues, gossiping, and whispering in the 
corridors. All of this is right out of Alexander Dumas."

Cook has just proved that Alexandre Dumas was a woman.

I supposed the violence in pre-1977 Wolfe is influenced by the shadow of Card thrown backward in time.

The part about volcanoes, mountain building, and subduction, though, is probably based on "I remembered that we rowed across the crater of a volcano. Might it not have been the Cumaean's kettle? Urth's fires were long dead, as Master Malrubius had taught us..." I don't know of anything that contradicts that--is there something?

Jerry Friedman

> From: Christopher Simon <kierkegaurdian at gmail.com>
>To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>; "urth at urth.net" <urth at urth.net> 
>Sent: Thursday, September 5, 2013 4:36 PM
> From: Jeff Wilson
>To: urth at urth.net
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20130905/1b1e490f/attachment.htm>

---

From: Jerry Friedman <jerry_friedman at yahoo.com>
Date: Fri, 06 Sep 2013 04:40:15 +0000

He certainly missed the sentence "When I had first come to realize, as a boy, that the green circle of the moon was in fact a sort of island hung in the sky, whose color derived from 
forests, now immemorially old, planted in the earliest days of the race 
of Man, I had formed an intention of going there..."? SotL, Ch. XIII.

Jerry Friedman

>Sent: Thursday, September 5, 2013 7:23 PM
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20130905/971004c1/attachment-0001.htm>

---

From: Jeff Wilson <jwilson at clueland.com>
Date: Fri, 06 Sep 2013 07:36:06 +0000

> confident in my abilities....

I look forward to the time when I accumulate sufficient years to become
infallible as well.

---

From: Marc Aramini <marcaramini at yahoo.com>
Date: Fri, 06 Sep 2013 14:02:39 +0000

Sent from my iPhone

> I look forward to the time when I accumulate sufficient years to become

I was just born that way.   

Kind of amazing how one moron claiming authority can stir up the pot.  I feel like the appropriate answer to his attention seeking rhetoric is the same as to those    end of time sign wavers: cool man, whatever, and make a silent note to just ignore him and snort in derision if his name ever comes up.  What a tool.  

Card's influence all over wolfe? Clearly the way Hemingway influenced Lawrence Sterne.

---

From: Gerry Quinn <gerry at bindweed.com>
Date: Fri, 06 Sep 2013 15:45:02 +0000

But the Moon has no atmosphere — forests couldn’t grow there!

Seriously, why bother responding?  The guy is plainly clueless about any SF that exists outside very limited parameters.  There are enough comments already pointing that out to him. 

- Gerry Quinn

From: Jerry Friedman 

He certainly missed the sentence "When I had first come to realize, as a boy, that the green circle of the moon was in fact a sort of island hung in the sky, whose color derived from forests, now immemorially old, planted in the earliest days of the race of Man, I had formed an intention of going there..."  SotL, Ch. XIII.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20130906/d95908ae/attachment.htm>

---

From: Jeff Wilson <jwilson at clueland.com>
Date: Fri, 06 Sep 2013 15:58:15 +0000

On Fri, September 6, 2013 10:45, Gerry Quinn wrote:
> Seriously, why bother responding?  The guy is plainly clueless about any
> SF that exists outside very limited parameters.  There are enough comments
> already pointing that out to him.

I doubt Cook is salvageable, but the site editor might be. He seems
willing to defend Cook against "ad hominem" attacks, but a list of quotes
obviously referring to the green Lune and some further factual examples of
Cook's unclued bogosity might be more persuasuive.

---

From: Robin B. Smith <robinbsmith at gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 06 Sep 2013 16:00:04 +0000

It's already gotten more attention than it deserves.

On Fri, Sep 6, 2013 at 10:45 AM, Gerry Quinn <gerry at bindweed.com> wrote:

>  *From:* Jerry Friedman <jerry_friedman at yahoo.com>
>
>  He certainly missed the sentence "When I had first come to realize, as a
> boy, that the green circle of the moon was in fact a sort of island hung in
> the sky, whose color derived from forests, now immemorially old, planted in
> the earliest days of the race of Man, I had formed an** intention of
> going there..."  SotL, Ch. XIII.
>
>

-- 
Robin B. Smith
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20130906/0d30e82a/attachment.htm>

---

From: Jerry Friedman <jerry_friedman at yahoo.com>
Date: Fri, 06 Sep 2013 17:11:05 +0000

> From: Jeff Wilson jwilson at clueland.com

Persuade the editor to do what???Not let Cook write any more columns for him? That might work. The only reason to publish nonsense is that it's effective trolling, and since the editor closed the comments, he's probably not in favor of trolling.

Jerry Friedman

---

From: Jerry Friedman <jerry_friedman at yahoo.com>
Date: Fri, 06 Sep 2013 17:48:02 +0000

>The part about volcanoes, mountain building, and subduction, though, is probably based on "I remembered that we rowed across the crater of a volcano. Might it not have been the Cumaean's kettle? Urt…
.
By the way, Cook has this part backwards. He writes, "without vulcanism and tectonic plate induction in the ocean, carbon dioxide would not be removed from the atmosphere and recycled into the mantle where it can stay out of the atmosphere and not smother life."? However, subduction and vulcanism return carbon dioxide to the atmosphere after it's been sequestered in calcium carbonate on the sea floor. Without plate tectonics, the atmosphere would lose all its carbon dioxide in a million years.

http://books.google.com/books?id=sZgB52BCa0UC&pg=PA173

If Urth's tectonic activity has in fact stopped, then Wolfe does fail to address the problem of disappearing carbon dioxide--if it was known when he was writing. On the other hand, despite Severian's speculation that tectonicism might have stopped before the evolution of humanity, the actual stopping time might be much less than a million years before his time.

Of course, Erebus and Abaia might be scouring?extracting the CO2 from?oceanic calcium carbonate?to keep the ecosystem going, and their reason for wanting to enslave humanity might be only that they need humans to help with this process. Shortsighted of Severian not to go along.

Jerry Friedman

---

From: DAVID STOCKHOFF <dstockhoff at verizon.net>
Date: Fri, 06 Sep 2013 18:04:40 +0000

Interesting thought. Could the New Sun restart Urth's tectonic activity and thus its CO2 cycle? Would that put Floodmaster Severian and the Evil Twins on the same side?

As it happens, I'm reading an old Poul Anderson story about terraforming Venus. The colonists intend to flood the planet by starting up its dead vulcanism, releasing the water supposedly trapped in the mantle and spreading it across the surface. They also are busy converting the paraformaldehyde/CO2 atmosphere into water and oxygen.

Now THAT'S science fiction! None of this silly torturer nonsense.

> From: Jerry Friedman <jerry_friedman at yahoo.com>
>Sent: Friday, September 6, 2013 1:48 PM
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20130906/45447a64/attachment.htm>

---

From: DAVID STOCKHOFF <dstockhoff at verizon.net>
Date: Fri, 06 Sep 2013 18:28:03 +0000

Edit.

> From: DAVID STOCKHOFF <dstockhoff at verizon.net>
>Sent: Friday, September 6, 2013 2:04 PM
>As it happens, I'm reading an old Poul Anderson story about terraforming Venus. The colonists intend to flood the planet by starting up its dead vulcanism [with hydrogen bombs], releasing the water supposedly trapped in the mantle and spreading it across the surface. They also are busy converting the paraformaldehyde/CO2 atmosphere into water and oxygen.
>
>
>>By the way, Cook has this part backwards. He writes, "without
 vulcanism and tectonic plate induction in the ocean, carbon dioxide would not be removed from the atmosphere and recycled into the mantle where it can stay out of the atmosphere and not smother life."? However, subduction and vulcanism return carbon dioxide to the atmosphere after it's been sequestered in calcium carbonate on the sea floor. Without plate tectonics, the atmosphere would lose all its carbon dioxide in a million years.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20130906/4a707ed4/attachment.htm>

---

From: entonio at gmail.com <entonio at gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 06 Sep 2013 20:44:52 +0000

My thoughts exactly. Terra is full of blabbering conceited illiterates.  Which one are y'all going to hammer sense into next?

---

From: Sergei SOLOVIEV <soloviev at irit.fr>
Date: Fri, 06 Sep 2013 20:52:00 +0000

J

To me one of the strongest points that can be used to rebuff Cook (who 
really seems to me a pompous idiot)
is that most of the answers can be found in BOTNs itself - like Lune 
(the moon) he overlooked.

I think one of the aspects of the world described by Wolfe is loss of 
memory/unreliability of information
Severian gets from others. Not long before, in times of Typhon, 
scientific information was much
more available. So, why should we/he believe that plate tectonics and 
volcanism really stopped?
And if it stopped, why? Maybe Erebus, Abaia etc; have their role in 
that? Who knows where
(how deep) their roots now are? But this fuzzy world picture is part of 
what Wolfe describes!

And poor Cook thinks that our actual theories (like plate tectonics 
recycling CO2) are absolute truth?

According to the story of Cyriaca recently Urth was controlled by 
machines. Could they not
(until recently) recycle all CO2? I think a very convincing answer may 
be built just on
careful reading of BOTNs itself.

Cheers

Sergei Soloviev

erry Friedman wrote:
> By the way, Cook has this part backwards.  He writes, "without vulcanism and tectonic plate induction in the ocean, carbon dioxide would not be removed from the atmosphere and recycled into the mantle where it can stay out of the atmosphere and not smother life."  However, subduction and vulcanism return carbon dioxide to the atmosphere after it's been sequestered in calcium carbonate on the sea floor.  Without plate tectonics, the atmosphere would lose all its carbon dioxide in a million years.
>  
> Of course, Erebus and Abaia might be scouring extracting the CO2 from oceanic calcium carbonate to keep the ecosystem going, and their reason for wanting to enslave humanity might be only that they need humans to help with this process.  Shortsighted of Severian not to go along.
>  
> Jerry Friedman

---

From: António Pedro Marques <entonio at gmail.com>
Date: Sat, 07 Sep 2013 00:04:43 +0000

No dia 06/09/2013, ?s 21:52, Sergei SOLOVIEV <soloviev at irit.fr> escreveu:

> J
> 
> 
> To me one of the strongest points that can be used to rebuff Cook (who really seems to me a pompous idiot)
> is that most of the answers can be found in BOTNs itself - like Lune (the moon) he overlooked.
> 
> I think one of the aspects of the world described by Wolfe is loss of memory/unreliability of information
> Severian gets from others. Not long before, in times of Typhon, scientific information was much
> more available. So, why should we/he believe that plate tectonics and volcanism really stopped?
> And if it stopped, why? Maybe Erebus, Abaia etc; have their role in that? Who knows where
> (how deep) their roots now are? But this fuzzy world picture is part of what Wolfe describes!

The person in question seems simple enough to think that if a character tells us some factoid about their world, then it must be so.

> And poor Cook thinks that our actual theories (like plate tectonics recycling CO2) are absolute truth?

In that, alas, he is not alone. There are plenty of folks who think 'science' has got it all figured out. Usually, it's people who know very little of 'science' but like it a lot anyway.

---

From: Jeff Wilson <jwilson at clueland.com>
Date: Sat, 07 Sep 2013 04:26:07 +0000

On Fri, September 6, 2013 15:44, entonio at gmail.com wrote:
> My thoughts exactly. Terra is full of blabbering conceited illiterates.
> Which one are y'all going to hammer sense into next?

Not the blabberer, the blabberer's gatekeeper. That is, taking a
sufficiently persuasive rebuttal to the site editor that he asks the guy
to clean up his act. I'm sure you would agree that a writer is more likely
to heed their editor than a random reader?

---

From: Jeff Wilson <jwilson at clueland.com>
Date: Sat, 07 Sep 2013 04:39:23 +0000

On Fri, September 6, 2013 13:04, DAVID STOCKHOFF wrote:
> Interesting thought. Could the New Sun restart Urth's tectonic activity
> and thus its CO2 cycle? Would that put Floodmaster Severian and the Evil
> Twins on the same side?

I'm not sure if we've discussed it recently, but I believe the tectonic
issues are moot because Sev's recognition of constellations from his era
being visible over Apu Punchau's pampa put an upper limit of 50,000 -
100,000 years between them, due to apparent motion of the stars over time.

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Popular_Science_Monthly/Volume_4/January_1874/Past_and_Future_of_a_Constellation

So, there's not enough time for current vulcanism to run down.

---

From: Jerry Friedman <jerry_friedman at yahoo.com>
Date: Sat, 07 Sep 2013 17:52:54 +0000

> From: Jeff Wilson <jwilson at clueland.com>
>To: DAVID STOCKHOFF <dstockhoff at verizon.net>; The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net> 
>

I don't remember TUotNS well at all. Are you saying that we know plate tectonics was still going on in Apu-Punchau's time?

Jerry Friedman

---

From: Jerry Friedman <jerry_friedman at yahoo.com>
Date: Sat, 07 Sep 2013 17:54:10 +0000

> to heed their editor than a random reader?

I'd help with this.

Jerry Friedman

---

From: Jeff Wilson <jwilson at clueland.com>
Date: Sat, 07 Sep 2013 18:31:02 +0000

On Sat, September 7, 2013 12:52, Jerry Friedman wrote:
> I don't remember TUotNS well at all. Are you saying that we know plate
> tectonics was still going on in Apu-Punchau's time?

There's no reason to think they would have stopped any earlier for
natural, gradual reasons. A loose black bean might be involved somehow,
but evem if that took effect instantly, it would still be taking effect
instantly in Typhon's time, barely a thousand years before Sev's.

The slowing of geology processes and the refrigeration of the earth in
somewhat of a historical time scale was once the current scientific
thought in the 19th century (Bellamy mentions it in LOOKING BACKWARD), so
the idea has a reason to be present and for the estimated time necessary
to be reckoned past, however mistakenly by the characters. But they have
(or so it suits the translator G.W. to use) different works for mountain
and volcano, and the crater lake of the averns is distinguished in kind
from the mountain lake Diuturna, which seems off for such a living
langauge to make plain if this is distinction found in a prehistoric
detail of natural history.

Subtextually, Erebus in the south is very, very suggestive of Mt Erebus,
the Antarctic volcano of our contemporal activity. There may be other,
oblique references to vulcanism seen by human eyes in the books, but I'd
have to hunt, or check the Lexicon, or both.

---

From: Jeff Wilson <jwilson at clueland.com>
Date: Sat, 07 Sep 2013 18:52:41 +0000

> tectonics was still going on in Apu-Punchau's time?

Aha! When Severian is struck by the Jailers' weapon, Urth trembles and the
curtain wall section falls to match its place in his native time. His
survival is attributed to the earthquake knocking him out of the line of
fire or otherwise spoiling the gunner's aim, and everyone goes about their
business. Ergo, earthquakes are known in Typhon's time and common enough
in the area of Nessus that the inhabitants have become accustomed to them.

This is all described in URTH, however, and may indeed be a belated patch
on previous BOTNS continuity as I expect the entire cyclic time thing is,
unless we can find something in the first four volumes. The crooked
sundial in Valeria's courtyard might be evidence....

Anyone recall any stuck doors or such mentioned?

---

From: Jerry Friedman <jerry_friedman at yahoo.com>
Date: Sun, 08 Sep 2013 04:25:09 +0000

> From: Ant?nio Pedro Marques <entonio at gmail.com>

>>  And if it stopped, why? Maybe Erebus, Abaia etc; have their role in that? 
>> Who knows where  (how deep) their roots now are?

Or whether they have roots?

>> But this fuzzy world picture is part of what Wolfe describes!
> 
> The person in question seems simple enough to think that if a character tells us 
> some factoid about their world, then it must be so.

Well, he might justifiably ask, if Wolfe intended plate tectonics to exist on Urth, how it makes the book better for Severian to tell us that it stopped. To improve the dying-earth atmosphere?

> In that, alas, he is not alone. There are plenty of folks who think 
> 'science' has got it all figured out. Usually, it's people who know 
> very little of 'science' but like it a lot anyway.

It's hard to dispute that plate tectonics recycles CO2, since carbonate-containing rocks get subducted close to volcanoes that discharge CO2. The part that science might not have completely figured out is whether there are or could be other recycling mechanisms. Indeed, presumably with the genetic engineering that created the anpiels and dog-men and so forth, previous ages could have developed organisms that release CO2 from calcium carbonates on the ocean floor.

Jerry Friedman

---

From: Jerry Friedman <jerry_friedman at yahoo.com>
Date: Sun, 08 Sep 2013 04:34:07 +0000

> But they have

We have words for geological features caused by glaciers, though the people who use those words aren't expecting another Ice Age any time soon. Also, Severian doesn't bother to specify "extinct volcano", which I think he'd do if he believed there were active volcanoes around.

[next post]

> This is all described in URTH,

So it's irrelevant to Cook. I imagine most here will take it as evidence, though. Then an interesting question, as I said in my previous post, is how it makes the book better for Severian (or his source, Master Malrubius) to be lying or mistaken.

If TBotNS takes place a mere million years after (the analog of) our time, which Michael Andre-Driussi suggests is around an upper limit, I agree that there's no time for plate tectonics to come to a complete stop naturally. As Sergei Soloviev says, the question is why it happened. We might speculatively blame whoever put the black hole in the sun.

> however, and may indeed be a belated patch

On the other hand, abandoned buildings in Nessus and giant humanoid sun-facing statues seem to last indefinitely.

> Anyone recall any stuck doors or such mentioned?

Do earthquakes cause doors to get stuck?

Jerry Friedman

---

From: David Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net>
Date: Sun, 08 Sep 2013 12:41:41 +0000

> Well, he might justifiably ask, if Wolfe intended plate tectonics to exist on Urth, how it makes the book better for Severian to tell us that it stopped.  To improve the dying-earth atmosphere?

I'm intrigued by Jeff's idea:

to be reckoned past, however mistakenly by the characters.

We've seen plenty of evidence that Wolfe gleaned gems from the 
historical trash heap of incorrect comprehensions of the physical 
universe in writing BNS. In fact, one could take it a step further and 
say that his universe is entirely created from such pulpy cliches---

by which I mean to make a direct literary connection, because the pulp 
SF Wolfe admires, from Cthulhu to, I don't know, maybe Flash Gordon and 
beyond, consists almost entirely of disproven scientific assumptions. 
Look at how the surface environment of Venus has been (mis)conceived 
throughout the history of SF.

---knowing full well that they do not fit well together. Two other 
well-known cases of this are Severian's comments about geological strata 
and the various genetic theories of 5HC, which Lee has identified as 
BNS's thematic precursor. Would this not, in Wolfe's thinking, parallel 
all the valid but imperfect understandings of the *nonphysical 
*universe? It's all the same, on other words---the science we believe 
today will be the superstition of tomorrow.

So yes, it makes the book better.

Also, "death" is perhaps a relative term on a geologic time scale. In 
our time, small volcanic islands are created before our eyes. In 
Severian's, this may no longer occur, but the plates could experience 
settling for quite some time after the primary tectonic activity has 
either ceased or simply decreased enough that most people assume Urth is 
dead, because all the volcanoes are. Thus the earthquakes in Typhon's time.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20130908/4b679584/attachment.htm>

---

From: Gerry Quinn <gerry at bindweed.com>
Date: Sun, 08 Sep 2013 13:19:36 +0000

From: David Stockhoff

> Well, he might justifiably ask, if Wolfe intended plate tectonics
> to exist on Urth, how it makes the book better for Severian to
> tell us that it stopped.  To improve the dying-earth atmosphere?
>
> The slowing of geology processes and the refrigeration of the earth
>  in somewhat of a historical time scale was once the current scientific
> thought in the 19th century (Bellamy mentions it in LOOKING BACKWARD),
>  so the idea has a reason to be present and for the estimated time
> necessary to be reckoned past, however mistakenly by the characters.

Wasn't that prior to the discovery of radioactivity, though?  [The limited 
lifespan that the Sun would have if its energy output were based on chemical 
or gravitational processes was also considered a problem for evolutionary 
theory, which required a longer timescale.  But the Sun actually operates on 
nuclear fusion, and nuclear fission continues to heat the Earth internally.]

However I agree that Wolfe doesn't necessarily care where a scientific 
concept comes from.  And he leaves matters intentionally vague; his motto is 
that the reader should not be able to disprove the scientific possibililty 
of something (e.g. the gigantic godlings) as they do not have quite enough 
information to locate them in specific well-understood physical models.  I 
do not think he always succeeds perfectly in this endeavour, but he does 
pretty well, and the reader should not fret to much about seeming scientific 
contradictions (or worse, build complex metaphysical hypotheses based on 
them).

One thing that strikes me is that the New Sun explicitly seems to restore 
the tectonic activity of Urth.  This is predicted in the play of Dr. Talos 
("continents will founder", etc.), and rendered explicitly in _Urth of the 
New Sun_.

It's hard to see scientifically how a white hole cancelling a black hole 
would do that - but seemingly it does.  If so, one might argue for the the 
theory that the black hole in the Sun somehow stopped plate tectonics. 
Perhaps what is in the Sun is not quite a black hole as we think of it. 
[For that matter, I think an actual black hole in the Sun would cause it to 
heat up - but even if I am correct, story clearly must trump science in this 
regard.]

- Gerry Quinn

---

From: Marc Aramini <marcaramini at yahoo.com>
Date: Sun, 08 Sep 2013 13:56:21 +0000

there is that "thing" sleeping in the mine with the ape men, that Severian says he might "now" know what it is - related to tectonic movement? What is down there? Does a throwaway detail like that resonate with something else in the text?

________________________________
 From: David Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net>
To: Jerry Friedman <jerry_friedman at yahoo.com>; The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net> 
Sent: Sunday, September 8, 2013 5:41 AM
Subject: Re: (urth) "been teaching literature for over 35 years"

We've seen plenty of evidence that Wolfe gleaned gems from the historical trash heap of incorrect comprehensions of the physical universe in writing BNS. In fact, one could take it a step further and say that his universe is entirely created from such pulpy cliches---

by which I mean to make a direct literary connection, because the
    pulp SF Wolfe admires, from Cthulhu to, I don't know, maybe Flash
    Gordon and beyond, consists almost entirely of disproven scientific
    assumptions. Look at how the surface environment of Venus has been
    (mis)conceived throughout the history of SF.

---knowing full well that they do not fit well together. Two other
    well-known cases of this are Severian's comments about geological
    strata and the various genetic theories of 5HC, which Lee has
    identified as BNS's thematic precursor. Would this not, in Wolfe's
    thinking, parallel all the valid but imperfect understandings of the nonphysical universe? It's all the same, on other words---the science we believe today will be the superstition of tomorrow.

Also, "death" is perhaps a relative term on a geologic time scale.
    In our time, small volcanic islands are created before our eyes. In
    Severian's, this may no longer occur, but the plates could
    experience settling for quite some time after the primary tectonic
    activity has either ceased or simply decreased enough that most
    people assume Urth is dead, because all the volcanoes are. Thus the
    earthquakes in Typhon's time.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20130908/e53d49ef/attachment.htm>

---

From: David Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net>
Date: Sun, 08 Sep 2013 16:20:06 +0000

On 9/8/2013 9:19 AM, Gerry Quinn wrote:
> Wasn't that prior to the discovery of radioactivity, though?  [The 
> limited lifespan that the Sun would have if its energy output were 
> based on chemical or gravitational processes was also considered a 
> problem for evolutionary theory, which required a longer timescale.  
> But the Sun actually operates on nuclear fusion, and nuclear fission 
> continues to heat the Earth internally.]

Absolutely. Here's a clear summary of the four forces that create heat: 
isotopic decay (85%?), latent heat (5%?), residual heat (5%?), and 
gravitational differentiation (5%?): http://phys.org/news62952904.html. 
And yet the Earth IS gradually cooling.

> concept comes from.  And he leaves matters intentionally vague; his 
> motto is that the reader should not be able to disprove the scientific 
> possibililty of something (e.g. the gigantic godlings) as they do not 
> have quite enough information to locate them in specific 
> well-understood physical models.  I do not think he always succeeds 
> perfectly in this endeavour, but he does pretty well, and the reader 
> should not fret to much about seeming scientific contradictions (or 
> worse, build complex metaphysical hypotheses based on them).

Agreed. The hypothesis I had in mind was one supported by Wolfe's own 
remarks, to the effect that the ancients were just as smart as we are, 
just as foolish, and yet rarely completely wrong in their understanding 
of the universe. Their understanding was merely imperfect, as is ours. 
Thus gods and godlings may be as real as our scientific theories, 
cast-aside or not.

>
> One thing that strikes me is that the New Sun explicitly seems to 
> restore the tectonic activity of Urth.  This is predicted in the play 
> of Dr. Talos ("continents will founder", etc.), and rendered 
> explicitly in _Urth of the New Sun_.

My thought exactly, although "founder" could simply mean "drown." If you 
do read it that way, I assume this would be caused by gravitational 
shocks from the New Sun's approach, leading not only to temporarily 
increased plate movement but perhaps also to increased heat+shear forces 
in the mantle, as I assume would arise in any massive transfer of energy 
to a planet.

As a side note, my conception of the New Sun's coming involves rapid 
(but sub-lightspeed, so that it can be seen approaching) movement of a 
stellar mass across the galaxy with no deceleration and no inertia. 
Thus, rather than taking days, the catastrophic event takes only hours 
as the New Sun enters the solar system and "seats" itself at the center. 
It's quick. It's basically magic. Maybe I'm wrong.

>
> It's hard to see scientifically how a white hole cancelling a black 
> hole would do that - but seemingly it does.  If so, one might argue 
> for the the theory that the black hole in the Sun somehow stopped 
> plate tectonics. Perhaps what is in the Sun is not quite a black hole 
> as we think of it. [For that matter, I think an actual black hole in 
> the Sun would cause it to heat up - but even if I am correct, story 
> clearly must trump science in this regard.]

My first question would be why the black hole did not cause the same 
effects (i.e., a flood) on approaching Urth, since none are mentioned.

One answer would be that it was small, having not yet eaten of the Sun; 
another would be that it did not approach but was inserted in place. 
Another would be that it wasn't a black hole as we now understand 
it---maybe more like the metaphorical opposite of a White Fountain, a 
kind of hyperdimensional drain pipe. Either way, suppression of 
heat-induced mantle activity doesn't seem a likely result, unless it 
magically drains heat from the entire solar system. Certainly reduced 
heat and light alone couldn't cool the upper mantle of a presumably 
volcanically active planet except by magic.

However, Wegener himself incorrectly thought that tidal drag was the 
primary cause of plate movement (he didn't realize the ocean crust moved 
too), and it's been proposed for certain Jovian moons as well. So 
depending on how we understand both the black hole and Earth tectonics, 
perhaps a case could be made for suppression by gravity. Maybe the black 
hole caused planetary orbits to slow (unless it sped them up), reducing 
tidal drag heat just enough to noticeably reduce volcanism and plate 
motion without changing interior conditions much. By the same token, a 
rapid shift in the other direction could wake them up again.

---

From: Gerry Quinn <gerry at bindweed.com>
Date: Sun, 08 Sep 2013 20:37:47 +0000

From: David Stockhoff 

> My thought exactly, although "founder" could simply mean "drown." 

There was stuff about new continents rising too, though.

- Gerry Quinn

---

From: Sergei SOLOVIEV <soloviev at irit.fr>
Date: Sun, 08 Sep 2013 21:09:54 +0000

The idea seems interesting, though to me the "thing" reminded (when I 
was reading) rather Balrog of Tolkien -

Another remark - I think that essential achievement of GW is creation of 
the atmosphere of
"medieval" world in BOTNs, when there is very little reliable 
information (remember
Severian's thoughts after his visit to sorcerer's willage about 
transmission of information
about "magics"). If we compare it with our Middle Ages, since Antiquity 
there where
scholars and educated people who knew that Earth is round, not flat, by 
the way,
most of Roman Church hierarchy knew it, but people still believed in the 
flat Earth -

Sergei

Marc Aramini wrote:
> there is that "thing" sleeping in the mine with the ape men, that 
> Severian says he might "now" know what it is - related to tectonic 
> movement?  What is down there?  Does a throwaway detail like that 
> resonate with something else in the text?
>
> *From:* David Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net>
> *To:* Jerry Friedman <jerry_friedman at yahoo.com>; The Urth Mailing List 
> <urth at lists.urth.net>
> *Sent:* Sunday, September 8, 2013 5:41 AM
> *Subject:* Re: (urth) "been teaching literature for over 35 years"
>
>
> SF Wolfe admires, from Cthulhu to, I don't know, maybe Flash Gordon 
> and beyond, consists almost entirely of disproven scientific 
> thinking, parallel all the valid but imperfect understandings of the 
> *nonphysical *universe? It's all the same, on other words---the 
> science we believe today will be the superstition of tomorrow.
>
> either ceased or simply decreased enough that most people assume Urth 
> is dead, because all the volcanoes are. Thus the earthquakes in 
> Typhon's time.
>
>
> To post, write urth at urth.net <mailto:urth at urth.net>

---

From: David Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net>
Date: Sun, 08 Sep 2013 21:45:56 +0000

On 9/8/2013 4:37 PM, Gerry Quinn wrote:
>
>
> From: David Stockhoff On 9/8/2013 9:19 AM, Gerry Quinn wrote:
>
>> > One thing that strikes me is that the New Sun explicitly seems to > 
>> > of Dr. Talos ("continents will founder", etc.), and rendered > 

You're right---I had forgotten.

---

From: Jeff Wilson <jwilson at clueland.com>
Date: Sun, 08 Sep 2013 22:07:15 +0000

> And yet the Earth IS gradually cooling.

Back in ~1980, I believe the isotopic decay source was the only one
generally recognized, and it's possible that the metal depletion mentioned
in the Book would be of *radioactive* metals, powering the great ships and
robots aboard them. This explains a possible reason for there to be still
funeral bronzes and moveable type in a metal poor world, and of course
isotopes sent into space can't keep the crust lubricated.

> It's quick. It's basically magic. Maybe I'm wrong.

I think the White Fountain is sub-stellar in magnitude and involves a form
of negative mass, but otherwise as you say.  Inertia is mitigated by the
Kirbyesque machinery tended by the crews below the surface of Yesod's
artificial planet.

> effects (i.e., a flood) on approaching Urth, since none are mentioned.

The black beans may have been seeds or kernels, quantum black holes
humanly transportable and meant to grow later into larger ones. Some or
most may have failed or merged, as it is later said that a singular worm
gnaws at the heart of the sun. But that may be a bit if a gag on Wolfe's
part, making them Mexican jumping beans!

---

From: David Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net>
Date: Sun, 08 Sep 2013 22:40:29 +0000

On 9/8/2013 6:07 PM, Jeff Wilson wrote:
> in the Book would be of*radioactive*  metals, powering the great ships and

How far down would humans have to strip the mantle (using robots, of 
course) to mess with tectonics? Wouldn't the entire planetary surface 
have to be mined? or just where plates meet?

---

From: Gerry Quinn <gerry at bindweed.com>
Date: Sun, 08 Sep 2013 23:52:09 +0000

From: Jeff Wilson

> part, making them Mexican jumping beans!

I interpret them as seeds of what later became the undersea lords - Erebus, 
Abaia et al.

(My pet hypothesis, admittedly coming from SF of a later era, is that they 
are nanotech-based seeds of near-Singularity level AIs.)

- Gerry Quinn

---

From: Jeff Wilson <jwilson at clueland.com>
Date: Mon, 09 Sep 2013 01:55:46 +0000

> have to be mined? or just where plates meet?

I have no idea, but it seems like no coincidence that *everywhere* in
Sev's time anyone happens to delve into the earth, there is already
evidence of previous diggers and builders.  Even underwater, he discovers
another huge drowned city beyond his own huge, newly drowned city. It
apparently took only a few centuries to carve faces into every mountain in
Sudamerica with the gear Typhon brought with him and was able to scrounge,
and there have been many nations on Urth for many chiliads before him....

---

From: David Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net>
Date: Mon, 09 Sep 2013 02:38:56 +0000

> and there have been many nations on Urth for many chiliads before him....

That, and the bits of plastic everywhere. Well, that would do away with 
any need for truly geologic time scales to explain Severian's remarks.

---

From: Jeff Wilson <jwilson at clueland.com>
Date: Mon, 09 Sep 2013 04:35:37 +0000

> any need for truly geologic time scales to explain Severian's remarks.

I'm not sure what you mean? What is it called?

I would think that any volume of plastic would indicate either enough time
for new petroleum to form, or that not enough time had yet passed for
processed plastic to crumble.

---

From: Jerry Friedman <jerry_friedman at yahoo.com>
Date: Mon, 09 Sep 2013 04:47:20 +0000

>by which I mean to make a direct literary connection, because the
????pulp SF Wolfe admires, from Cthulhu to, I don't know, maybe Flash
????Gordon and beyond, consists almost entirely of disproven scientific
????assumptions. Look at how the surface environment of Venus has been
????(mis)conceived throughout the history of SF.
>---knowing full well that they do not fit well together. Two other
????well-known cases of this are Severian's comments about geological
????strata and the various genetic theories of 5HC, which Lee has
????identified as BNS's thematic precursor. Would this not, in Wolfe's
????thinking, parallel all the valid but imperfect understandings of the nonphysical universe? It's all the same, on other words---the science we believe today will be the superstition of tomorrow.
>So yes, it makes the book better. 

Very interesting thoughts. Incidentally, they remind me of Severian's example of the hawk's nest. In the first place, it's fallacious. (Nest-building evolved in ground-living or even aquatic species before anyone got to the trees where one stick is useless.)? In the second, it seems that evolution by natural selection is the theory that Severian was taught. Does Wolfe see that as in the same category as other misconceptions he was taught?

>Also, "death" is perhaps a relative term on a geologic time scale.
????In our time, small volcanic islands are created before our eyes. In
????Severian's, this may no longer occur, but the plates could
????experience settling for quite some time after the primary tectonic
????activity has either ceased or simply decreased enough that most
????people assume Urth is dead, because all the volcanoes are. Thus the
????earthquakes in Typhon's time.

Seems possible.

By the way, supposedly curative hot springs were important in ancient times. Are they mentioned anywhere in BotNS?

Jerry Friedman

---

From: Jerry Friedman <jerry_friedman at yahoo.com>
Date: Mon, 09 Sep 2013 05:19:17 +0000

>>  On 9/8/2013 9:19 AM, Gerry Quinn wrote:
...

>>  in the mantle, as I assume would arise in any massive transfer of energy
...

Seems reasonable. It's certainly not from increased solar flux. However, that would be a LOT of energy. I'd wonder whether anybody at all could survive.

>>>  clearly must trump science in this regard.]

I think that a black hole, even as currently understood, would cool the sun if it were significantly cooler than the temperature of the interior of the sun. You can have some fun at <http://xaonon.dyndns.org/hawking/>.

> part, making them Mexican jumping beans!

Wait, I thought the black beans grew into the sea monsters, which is why the woman had to throw them into the sea (instead of just dropping them on the ground) to make them effective. Robert Borski speculated along these lines.

http://books.google.com/books?id=HykyT4UQ9JMC&pg=PA93

Anyway, it would make literary sense if whoever or whatever made the sun cool also stopped plate tectonics (if it's stopped), and if the process that fixed one also fixed the other.

Jerry Friedman

---

From: Jeff Wilson <jwilson at clueland.com>
Date: Mon, 09 Sep 2013 06:03:44 +0000

On Mon, September 9, 2013 00:19, Jerry Friedman wrote:
> Seems reasonable. It's certainly not from increased solar flux. However,
> that would be a LOT of energy. I'd wonder whether anybody at all could
> survive.

Indeed, the Yesodis don't expect them to survive, which is why they settle
the renewed earth with new people.

> I think that a black hole, even as currently understood, would cool the
> sun if it were significantly cooler than the temperature of the interior
> of the sun. You can have some fun at <http://xaonon.dyndns.org/hawking/>.

It's really not fair to hold Wolfe to the standards of another 3-4 decades
of theoretical physics. We no longer have the expectation of transcending
space and dimension as when the Book was being written.

> Wait, I thought the black beans grew into the sea monsters, which is why
> the woman had to throw them into the sea (instead of just dropping them on
> the ground) to make them effective. Robert Borski speculated along these
> lines.
>
> Anyway, it would make literary sense if whoever or whatever made the sun
> cool also stopped plate tectonics (if it's stopped), and if the process
> that fixed one also fixed the other.

I think it's a stretch when she throws them on the *sun*'s grave.

---

From: Gerry Quinn <gerry at bindweed.com>
Date: Mon, 09 Sep 2013 09:58:20 +0000

From: Jerry Friedman
[..]

> sun
>  if it were significantly cooler than the temperature of the interior of 
> the sun.
> You can have some fun at <http://xaonon.dyndns.org/hawking/>.

The Hawking temperature of a black hole in the sun doesn't matter.  What 
matters is the energy emission from infalling matter as it accelerates and 
is compressed before reaching the Schwarzschild radius.  Presumably it will 
form an accretion disk in the heart of the sun, but this will only happen 
when the radiation from the disk is sufficient to balance the hydrostatic 
pressure in a 'bubble' at the core of the sun.  Which is pretty high 
pressure!

If the black hole is not parked in the centre but orbiting at some distance, 
it will cause a net increase in radiation.  But over time 'friction' (in the 
most general sense) and mass increase will bring it to the centre.

So that's the first thing - the black hole is radiating pretty hard due to 
infalling matter.  Actually it seems arguable that it might radiate about as 
much as was radiated from the same zone (the zone of balance) as was 
radiating before, in which case its direct influence on the sun's 
temperature would be slight considering the black hole alone.

However, the radiation from the black hole comes from already 'burned' solar 
matter.  As it absorbs matter from the heart of the sun, more hydrogen-rich 
fuel will fall towards the centre of the sun.  Surely this would be expected 
to release some extra energy due to nuclear fusion?

In the second place, as it absorbs the sun's core matter it should cause the 
sun to effectively age.  Stars like the sun get hotter as they age, as the 
'burn' zone where fusion takes place expands in radius.  So for this reason, 
too, I would expect a black hole to cause the sun to heat up.

I'm sure - Wolfe's lack of detail wins again - one could find an argument 
for how cooling might occur.  But on first principles, I'd expect a black 
hole dropped into the sun to have a warming effect.

- Gerry Quinn

---

From: David Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net>
Date: Mon, 09 Sep 2013 11:49:40 +0000

> processed plastic to crumble.

Exactly. Severian doesn't call it plastic, but he refers to colored bits 
of something, so it has already crumbled.

Possibly it's a stretch and simply put there as a general clue to 
Severian's post-oil extraction time period. Since there could have been 
a vast amount of it lying around (probable; in fact I always took it as 
a bit of a joke, sort of dinosaurs-to-oil in reverse) I'd think it would 
be difficult to get a good estimate of how long it would take for all of 
it to disappear.

---

From: Jeffery Wilson <jwilson at clueland.com>
Date: Mon, 09 Sep 2013 12:01:07 +0000

On 9/9/2013 4:58 AM, Gerry Quinn wrote:
>
> I'm sure - Wolfe's lack of detail wins again - one could find an 
> argument for how cooling might occur.  But on first principles, I'd 
> expect a black hole dropped into the sun to have a warming effect.

In the late 1970s conception,  a black hole is an Einstein-Rosenbridge 
to somewhere else; Abbadon in Urth's case. It's supposed to be literally 
sending part of the sun's substance and generated energy *away*.  The 
remaining star is diminished in output per unit mess as well, as lighter 
stars are.

---

From: David Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net>
Date: Mon, 09 Sep 2013 12:13:04 +0000

On 9/9/2013 12:47 AM, Jerry Friedman wrote:
> Very interesting thoughts.  Incidentally, they remind me of Severian's example of the hawk's nest.  In the first place, it's fallacious.  (Nest-building evolved in ground-living or even aquatic species before anyone got to the trees where one stick is useless.)  In the second, it seems that evolution by natural selection is the theory that Severian was taught.  Does Wolfe see that as in the same category as other misconceptions he was taught?

Actually, I think his logic is not bad, given his lack of information:

... the first hawk to build one cannot have inherited its instinct to 
build from its parents, since they did not possess it. Nor could such an 
instinct have developed slowly, a thousand generations of hawks fetching 
one stick before some hawk

fetched two; because neither one stick nor two could be of the slightest 
use to the nesting hawks.

His conclusions are correct: neither hypothesis works. He seems to have 
a grade-school understanding of natural selection, but I think more to 
the point he is using logic to guess at an unguessable truth. He asks 
good questions but simply doesn't know how hawks evolved, and thus even 
these intelligent questions will not get him there:

The wheeling birds traced their hieroglyphics in the air, but they were 
not for me to read.

> By the way, supposedly curative hot springs were important in ancient times.  Are they mentioned anywhere in BotNS?

Not that I can recall.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20130909/882680d5/attachment-0001.htm>

---

From: Jeffery Wilson <jwilson at clueland.com>
Date: Mon, 09 Sep 2013 12:17:14 +0000

On 9/9/2013 6:49 AM, David Stockhoff wrote:
> Exactly. Severian doesn't call it plastic, but he refers to colored 
> bits of something, so it has already crumbled.
>
> Severian's post-oil extraction time period. Since there could have 
> been a vast amount of it lying around (probable; in fact I always took 
> it as a bit of a joke, sort of dinosaurs-to-oil in reverse) I'd think 
> it would be difficult to get a good estimate of how long it would take 
> for all of it to disappear.

Ah! "..../the kind of sand that artists call polychrome (because flecks 
of every color are mixed with its whiteness) is actually not sand at 
all, but the glass of the past, now pounded to powder by aeons of 
tumbling in the clamourous sea."

/I can see the confusion of plastic with glass by unilluminated people, 
but it should be too light to mix with sand, and perhaps should be as 
familiar as Sev says prosthetic limbs are. /
/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20130909/93e0c906/attachment.htm>

---

From: David Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net>
Date: Mon, 09 Sep 2013 12:39:09 +0000

> Anyway, it would make literary sense if whoever or whatever made the sun cool also stopped plate tectonics (if it's stopped), and if the process that fixed one also fixed the other.

That's basically what I was getting at. If we can't settle on a 
plausible physical explanation, there's always literary magic. The black 
hole (which after all is never called that) could simply taken as a 
general negative force and the NS as a positive one.

---

From: David Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net>
Date: Mon, 09 Sep 2013 12:41:30 +0000

On 9/9/2013 8:01 AM, Jeffery Wilson wrote:
> to somewhere else; Abbadon in Urth's case. It's supposed to be 
> literally sending part of the sun's substance and generated energy 
> *away*.  The remaining star is diminished in output per unit mess as 
> well, as lighter stars are.
>

Right. As I suggested, a cosmic drain pipe, eventually replaced by a 
fire hose.

---

From: Gerry Quinn <gerry at bindweed.com>
Date: Mon, 09 Sep 2013 12:42:40 +0000

From: Jeffery Wilson

> In the late 1970s conception,  a black hole is an Einstein-Rosenbridge to 
> somewhere else; Abbadon in Urth's case. It's supposed to be literally 

It doesn't matter (in engineering terms) whether stuff that reaches the 
event horizon goes somewhere else or not (that's kind of the definition of 
an event horizon).  But an accretion disk outside the Schwarzschild radius 
is just standard dynamics for any super-condensed object.  At a distance of 
several Schwarzschild radii, Newtonian physics will be reasonably accurate 
(albeit not in detail).

- Gerry Quinn

---

From: David Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net>
Date: Mon, 09 Sep 2013 12:42:45 +0000

On 9/9/2013 8:17 AM, Jeffery Wilson wrote:
>> been a vast amount of it lying around (probable; in fact I always 
>> took it as a bit of a joke, sort of dinosaurs-to-oil in reverse) I'd 
>> think it would be difficult to get a good estimate of how long it 
>> would take for all of it to disappear.
>
> Ah! "..../the kind of sand that artists call polychrome (because 
> flecks of every color are mixed with its whiteness) is actually not 
> sand at all, but the glass of the past, now pounded to powder by aeons 
> of tumbling in the clamourous sea."
>
> /I can see the confusion of plastic with glass by unilluminated 
> people, but it should be too light to mix with sand, and perhaps 
> should be as familiar as Sev says prosthetic limbs are. //

You're right---glass, not plastic. I suppose the plastic is gone.

---

From: David Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net>
Date: Mon, 09 Sep 2013 12:46:22 +0000

On 9/9/2013 8:42 AM, Gerry Quinn wrote:
>> In the late 1970s conception,  a black hole is an 
>> Einstein-Rosenbridge to somewhere else; Abbadon in Urth's case. It's 
>> supposed to be literally sending part of the sun's substance and 
>> generated energy *away*.  The remaining star is diminished in output 
>> per unit mess as well, as lighter stars are.
>
> It doesn't matter (in engineering terms) whether stuff that reaches 
> the event horizon goes somewhere else or not (that's kind of the 
> definition of an event horizon).  But an accretion disk outside the 
> Schwarzschild radius is just standard dynamics for any super-condensed 
> object.  At a distance of several Schwarzschild radii, Newtonian 
> physics will be reasonably accurate (albeit not in detail). 

Which is why I don't like the idea that the object has non-Newtonian 
effects outside/beyond the Sun.

---

From: Jeffery Wilson <jwilson at clueland.com>
Date: Mon, 09 Sep 2013 13:19:22 +0000

On 9/9/2013 7:42 AM, Gerry Quinn wrote:
> event horizon goes somewhere else or not (that's kind of the definition
> of an event horizon).  But an accretion disk outside the Schwarzschild
> radius is just standard dynamics for any super-condensed object.

What force acts on the matter to prevent it from following the usual 
swarm of elliptical orbits instead of the disk?

---

From: Marc Aramini <marcaramini at yahoo.com>
Date: Mon, 09 Sep 2013 13:42:13 +0000

I've made a ton of science - biological claims about Wolfe ... But his interest as a symbolist always seems to me to keep the science at that level - it's representation rather than the hard application, like the giant nucleic acid building in House of Ancestors having some atavistic sympathetic vibration with the real person's genetic material it "matches".  Accretion disks and schwarzschild radii seem ever so slightly "harder" than Wolfe's usual symbolic , tropish employment of science. 

When he obsesses about something, it is usually closer to industrial engineering and the kinds of materials used - if I had to guess I would say theoretical physics are treated a little differently than the "let's build this based on these building properties" descriptions that crop up (like talus manufacturing - this is where science becomes less metaphorical for Wolfe)

We really should keep mid 70s or even earlier understandings in mind, unless we are just talking about probabilities here that are not lit crit in nature.  

Are we talking about the text or the possibility of the text here?  Because Borges or st augustine will probably influence his treatment of a scientific mystery as much as his physics background ... 

Sent from my iPhone

On Sep 9, 2013, at 6:19 AM, Jeffery Wilson <jwilson at clueland.com> wrote:

> What force acts on the matter to prevent it from following the usual swarm of elliptical orbits instead of the disk?

---

From: Gerry Quinn <gerry at bindweed.com>
Date: Mon, 09 Sep 2013 13:50:09 +0000

From: David Stockhoff
On 9/9/2013 8:42 AM, Gerry Quinn wrote:

> > radius is just standard dynamics for any super-condensed object.  At a 
> > distance of several Schwarzschild radii, Newtonian physics will be 
> > reasonably accurate (albeit not in detail).

> effects outside/beyond the Sun.

Well, it could emit penetrating particles that have a heating effect when 
absorbed by matter.

Say it emitted a large pulse of particles similar to neutrinos, with a 
sufficiently small capture cross section that they could go through the 
Earth without much attenuation, but still much more absorbable by matter 
than neutrinos.  If you give them a penetration depth of several Earth 
diameters, then for every 10^12 tons or so mass-equivalent emitted in this 
form from the sun, you would heat the Earth by one degree.  A few hundred 
times that amount emitted over a period of might be enough to restart 
tectonic activity.  However, you then have the problem that it needs to be 
emitted over a rather long period, or the seas would boil, and the land 
would also become uncomfortably hot.  I think however if this radiation was 
absorbed chiefly by iron and similar heavy metals, life-threatening 
consequences would be mitigated, especially if the pulse lasted a few hours. 
(This should also prevent dramatic consequences for Jupiter and Saturn. 
Skuld might have problems, though, if it is still inhabited.)

- Gerry Quinn

---

From: Gerry Quinn <gerry at bindweed.com>
Date: Mon, 09 Sep 2013 13:56:02 +0000

From: Jeffery Wilson

> What force acts on the matter to prevent it from following the usual swarm 
> of elliptical orbits instead of the disk?

In a word, friction.  The matter would be gaseous in this case and particles 
could not swirl in independent orbits.  But even if it were composed of 
solid particles, they would soon collide, which would (1) heat the colliding 
particles (2) reduce their energy, and (3) set the colliding particles on 
closer trajectories than they were before.

- Gerry Quinn

---

From: Marc Aramini <marcaramini at yahoo.com>
Date: Mon, 09 Sep 2013 13:58:16 +0000

Curious Gerry, do you have an extensive physics background?  I have a biochem degree and I really love math to the more concrete calculus but physics was always one of my least favorite fields. If I were writing something this is the kind of information I would certainly gloss over, though of course half life and radioactive decay are familiar since I dealt with them all the time in chemistry. 

Sent from my iPhone

On Sep 9, 2013, at 6:50 AM, "Gerry Quinn" <gerry at bindweed.com> wrote:

>> > It doesn't matter (in engineering terms) whether stuff that reaches the > event horizon goes somewhere else or not (that's kind of the definition > of an event horizon).  But an accretion disk outside the Schwarzschild > radius is just standard dynamics for any super-condensed object.  At a > distance of several Schwarzschild radii, Newtonian physics will be > reasonably accurate (albeit not in detail).
> 
>> Which is why I don't like the idea that the object has non-Newtonian effects outside/beyond the Sun.
> 
> Well, it could emit penetrating particles that have a heating effect when absorbed by matter.
> 
> Say it emitted a large pulse of particles similar to neutrinos, with a sufficiently small capture cross section that they could go through the Earth without much attenuation, but still much more absorbable by matter than neutrinos.  If you give them a penetration depth of several Earth diameters, then for every 10^12 tons or so mass-equivalent emitted in this form from the sun, you would heat the Earth by one degree.  A few hundred times that amount emitted over a period of might be enough to restart tectonic activity.  However, you then have the problem that it needs to be emitted over a rather long period, or the seas would boil, and the land would also become uncomfortably hot.  I think however if this radiation was absorbed chiefly by iron and similar heavy metals, life-threatening consequences would be mitigated, especially if the pulse lasted a few hours. (This should also prevent dramatic consequences for Jupiter and Saturn. Skuld might have problems, though, if it is still inhabited.)
> 
> - Gerry Quinn
> 
> 
>

---

From: Jeffery Wilson <jwilson at clueland.com>
Date: Mon, 09 Sep 2013 14:16:22 +0000

On 9/9/2013 8:56 AM, Gerry Quinn wrote:
> In a word, friction.  The matter would be gaseous in this case and
> particles could not swirl in independent orbits.  But even if it were
> composed of solid particles, they would soon collide, which would (1)
> heat the colliding particles (2) reduce their energy, and (3) set the
> colliding particles on closer trajectories than they were before.

But all the stuff inside the sun's already colliding and touching.

How is the axis and irection of rotation of the disk picked?

---

From: Gerry Quinn <gerry at bindweed.com>
Date: Mon, 09 Sep 2013 14:30:22 +0000

From: Marc Aramini
> Curious Gerry, do you have an extensive physics background?  I have
>  a biochem degree and I really love math to the more concrete calculus
> but physics was always one of my least favorite fields. If I were writing
> something this is the kind of information I would certainly gloss over,
>  though of course half life and radioactive decay are familiar since I
> dealt with them all the time in chemistry.

No, my degree is in engineering, but I have always taken an interest in 
physics.

Half the battle in this sort of thing is developing the confidence to do 
calculations with big, approximate numbers!

- Gerry Quinn

---

From: Gerry Quinn <gerry at bindweed.com>
Date: Mon, 09 Sep 2013 14:42:28 +0000

From: Jeffery Wilson

>>> > the

>How is the axis and irection of rotation of the disk picked?

The Sun is already rotating, so its matter has angular momentum. Any 
difference in angular momentum gets magnified as an object shrinks (e.g. 
spinning skater pulling her arms in spins faster).  And angular momentum is 
conserved - there's nowhere for it to go except into the black hole, and 
even then it's one of the three kinds of 'hair' a black hole can have - i.e. 
a black hole's angular momentum can still interact with its surroundings, as 
can its electric charge and gravitational field.  A rotating object has a 
defined axis as well as direction.

This has happened before as the solar system was formed: note how all the 
planets and asteroids are in a plane, rotating in the same direction (bar 
the odd outlier that had some heavy collisions that sent it on an unusual 
trajectory)?  And the sun and planets also tend to rotate on their own axes 
in the same direction.  The solar system has a specific axis of rotation, 
because collisions early on resulted in a single axis dominating.

Another example: water draining out of a bathtub picks a direction, and 
sticks with it.

- Gerry Quinn

---

From: Jerry Friedman <jerry_friedman at yahoo.com>
Date: Mon, 09 Sep 2013 14:57:16 +0000

> the renewed earth with new people.

Good point.

> of theoretical physics.

That's why I said "even as currently understood". I was just thinking about
what might happen with current physics, as I take it Gerry was too, not holding
Wolfe to anything.

> We no longer have the expectation of transcending

I don't remember that we did then--did we?

> I think it's a stretch when she throws them on the *sun*'s grave.

I'm not following. What's a stretch? What's the sun's grave?

Jerry Friedman

---

From: Jeffery Wilson <jwilson at clueland.com>
Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 00:01:13 +0000

> I don't remember that we did then--did we?

A popular treatment in print was THE IRON SUN: ACROSS THE UNIVERSE WITH 
BLACK HOLES	(ISBN 0525134905, 9780525134909). Disney did a film called 
THE BLACK HOLE, and Blue Oyster Cult had
  some airplay with "Heavy Metal, Black and Silver".

> I'm not following.  What's a stretch?  What's the sun's grave?

I'm thinking it's figurative reference like, "I feel like someone is 
walking on my grave."

---

From: Gerry Quinn <gerry at bindweed.com>
Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 00:18:43 +0000

From: Jeffery Wilson 

>   some airplay with "Heavy Metal, Black and Silver".

Heh, I was going to mention BOC, along with Rush's Cygnus X-1!

- Gerry Quinn

---

From: David Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net>
Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 12:59:44 +0000

> When he obsesses about something, it is usually closer to industrial engineering and the kinds of materials used - if I had to guess I would say theoretical physics are treated a little differently…

That's very well put.

There seems to be a consensus here, if I may presume to summarize it:

(1) The Black Worm, whatever its nature, was put there to dim the sun.
         We are told that it "ate" of the sun. Since the White Fountain 
correlates with the then-current theory of matter fountains, the Worm 
must have worked by progressively removing solar matter. The Worm also 
fits old mythical ideas about portents of decline and harbingers of 
doom, so it works well on a symbolic level. As an actual black hole, it 
presents problems.

(2) It DID dim the sun and cool Urth.
         Did the Yesodis decide to shut down the experiment early? Was 
the intent to slowly freeze Urth to death? Was there a faction among 
them that wanted to give Urth one last chance? Their choice (Severian's 
choice too) was either to shut it down entirely or do another run with 
new subjects, but a few people escaped.

(3) It MAY also have somehow cooled Urth's mantle enough that volcanism 
stopped.
         Known volcanoes are apparently dead (Erebus), and there is an 
atmosphere of stasis and decay. On the other hand, Urth may already have 
been really old. But earthquakes were known in Typhon's time, when the 
Worm appeared. Symbolic decay works better to explain this than physical 
cooling. The Worm could not have removed matter from Urth's mantle, so 
any direct effect on Urth would have to take a different path anyway.

(4) The White Fountain restored the sun's power.
        Again, this would have been by adding or restoring matter to the 
sun. (Recall Silk's signs of addition and subtraction.)

(5) It also shocked Urth into catastrophic tidal floods---and possibly 
tectonic cataclysm as well.
         I conclude the tectonics question is a red herring. If Urth is 
mere chiliads older, no one would notice the continents no longer moving 
(only the gradual subsidence of obvious activity). But if Urth is 
millions of years older . . . no one would remember any kind of activity 
at all, and STILL no one would notice the continents no longer moving. 
So any effects on continental movements would have been lost on 
virtually 100% of Urth's inhabitants. (Jonas might have been in a 
position to notice such effects, but I don't think he mentions it.)

         So what's the point? (I think this supports both Urth as 20,000 
years in our "future" and an unnatural/supernatural/nonphysical 
explanation for any tectonic quiescence.) The quote from Dr Talus' play 
may be pure malarkey, or just a dramatic touch meant to get us to pay 
attention. Severian does not mention new volcanoes, new earthquakes, or 
new continents in UNS. If the continents do move again, it will be well 
out of the scope of his narrative.

         Had Wolfe really meant us to think the Worm stopped plate 
motion---and that it was important---he would surely have inserted such 
motion into UNS to show that it had reversed. So my guess is either it 
wasn't important or it didn't "really" happen.

Anyway, this has been an interesting discussion!

---

From: David Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net>
Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 13:10:01 +0000

On 9/11/2013 8:59 AM, David Stockhoff wrote:
> Had Wolfe really meant us to think the Worm stopped plate motion---and 
> that it was important---he would surely have inserted such motion into 
> UNS to show that it had reversed. So my guess is either it wasn't 
> important or it didn't "really" happen. 

And the same for breaking the carbon cycle, if the hypothetical tectonic 
suppression actually progressed to total stasis.

---

From: Jerry Friedman <jerry_friedman at yahoo.com>
Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 16:46:16 +0000

...

>>>>???I think that a black hole, even as currently understood, would cool the
>>>>???sun if it were significantly cooler than the temperature of the interior
>>>>???of the sun. You can have some fun at
>>> <http://xaonon.dyndns.org/hawking/>.
>>>
>BLACK HOLES??? (ISBN 0525134905, 9780525134909). Disney did a film called 
>? some airplay with "Heavy Metal, Black and Silver".

Oh, okay. I think that at the time, the theory that black holes might lead to other
universes (or other parts of this one), where they might be white holes, was
still current. I think the theory of black hole radiation, in which black holes and
white holes are the same thing, was also available (developed by Bekenstein
in 1972 and Hawking in 1974).

>>>>???Wait, I thought the black beans grew into the sea monsters, which is why
>>>>???the woman had to throw them into the sea (instead of just dropping them on
>>>>???the ground) to make them effective. Robert Borski speculated along these
>>>>???lines.
>>>>
>>>>? http://books.google.com/books?id=HykyT4UQ9JMC&pg=PA93
>>>>
>>>>???Anyway, it would make literary sense if whoever or whatever made the sun
>>>>???cool also stopped plate tectonics (if it's stopped), and if the process
>>>>???that fixed one also fixed the other.
>>>

Are you trying to frustrate me, or did I miss a post about "the sun's grave"? What's
a figurative reference like that line?

Jerry Friedman