Space Museum The Urth list — 2 messages, 2 voices, 13 Jul 1998 https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/974 Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it. Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact. ============================================================================== m.driussi — 13 Jul 1998, 21:28 Dan, Right, not all the buildings in the Citadel are former ships--just the towers, and maybe not all of them. The buildings: the picture gallery is made of brick, I think; then there are the barracks/city street-like structures they go by on their way to Echopraxia. My thoughts on zoetic transport ala Noah's Ark--I had it the other way around. Not that the mission never materialized, but rather, it did: that Earth was denuded of flora and fauna, a fallow desert; that sometime before Typhon or with Typhon, zoetic transports brought plants (including the avern) and animals (from alzabo to ylespil) from all over the galaxy; that having completed this reseeding mission, at least one transport was abandoned to rest on Urth like the Ark on Mount A--or wherever legend had it resting. Re: animal husbandry and beast master rites ("bestiality"?). You are right, and among other things it shows how very little Sev knows about his own lifelong neighbors, the beast handlers and the witches (who =knows= what the Red Tower is all about). (We actually know more about the beast handlers, even though he never met any within the text--and he met one or two witches!) OTOH, since Wolfe often has puns come to life in his work, I can't be certain that the beast marriage isn't really carried out. =mantis= ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Michael Straight — 14 Jul 1998, 09:01 follows, by subject match m.driussi > On Mon, 13 Jul 1998 m.driussi at genie.com wrote: > My thoughts on zoetic transport ala Noah's Ark--I had it the other > way around. Not that the mission never materialized, but rather, it > did: that Earth was denuded of flora and fauna, a fallow desert; that > sometime before Typhon or with Typhon, zoetic transports brought > plants (including the avern) and animals (from alzabo to ylespil) > from all over the galaxy; that having completed this reseeding > mission, at least one transport was abandoned to rest on Urth like > the Ark on Mount A--or wherever legend had it resting. Speaking of arks, I just recently looked up 'autarchy' wondering what the difference was between that and 'monarchy' and was surprised to learn that the original spelling is 'autarky' with connotations of self-sufficiency coming from the 'ark' bit. Could the change to an Autarchy from a Monarchy have had something to do with a movement to make Urth self-sufficient again? (One step of which would have had to have been the reseeding project you mention.) -Rostrum ------------------------------------------------------------------------------