{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/whorl/1510",
    "note": "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.",
    "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'"
  },
  "archive": "whorl",
  "thread": {
    "id": 1510,
    "subject": "time travel in Short Sun (and Chenille on Blue)",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "2002-01-02T02:20:38+00:00",
    "last": "2002-01-02T02:20:38+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<whorl-v0013-whorl.v012.n178.5@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "maa32",
        "address": "maa32 at dana.ucc.nau.edu"
      },
      "date": "2002-01-02T02:20:38+00:00",
      "subject": "time travel in Short Sun (and Chenille on Blue)",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "All right, this will be my last post for tonight.  (I guess I have nothing \nelse to do - I keep thinking of new stuff - hopefully someone will find \nSOMETHING worth discussing).\nNear the end of the first person narrated sections of Return to the Whorl, the \nnarrator says there is \"no returning to the past save in dreams.\"  \nThe description of Astral Travel that the narrator offers when he first \ndiscovers its repeatability identifies it as \"a dream in [his] sleeping mind\".\n Is there any indication that time travel occurs during those \"astral travel\" \nexperiences?  At first, I was sure that Blue and Green were Ushas and Lune \n(albeit a Lune that had been somehow cast from its orbit into a heliocentric \norbit and in which the green terraforming had gotten out of control, but it is \nstill close enough to effect the tides of Blue), but I find that stance \nuntenable in light of the accurate pasage of time between the Nessus that \nRigoglio remembers and the actual progress of the city. (does anybody else \nremember the part in Nightside the Long Sun where Marble's internal clock is \noff by a factor of ten?  That would make the time elapsed in the whorl 3,000 \nyears rather than 300 or so, but that is an untenable supposition as well, due \nto all sorts of other evidence that the time in the whorl was only a couple \nhundred years.)  All the cities of the neighbors that exist under the water \n(according to Seawrack)would at least seem to indicate that a similar flood \nhas occurred on Blue as the one that heralded the birth of Ushas.  Also, why \ndoes Jahlee make a big point about Merryn having problems with animals, too?  \nAre we to buy that the Cummean and Merryn are inhumi, and that they have \nalways been with mankind (or, if time travel is possible, always will be?)\n\nOk.  I kind of like the idea that the astral travel can be time travel, and \ncould explain the presence of Silk in Inclito's mother's story.  \nBut on the other hand, what about the narrator's ability to influence Fava's \nstory?  He claims he can change her story and enter it.  Can he exert the same \ninfluence on the accounts written by his family after he is gone (the even \nchapters of Return to the Whorl), to change things and make it more or less \nreliable according to his whims - steering Hide away from an event which he \ndoes not want revealed?\n\nOne more random thought.  At the end of Chapter 7 in Return to the Whorl, the \nnarrator keeps seeing Auk in his chair and he confuses Jahlee for Chenille \nbecause she fed on a \"big woman\" who was drunk or on rust outside the bar.  \nCould the astral travel that the narrator undertook towards the very end of In \nGreen's Jungles, in which he visited his body with his son Sinew and gave him \nthe white ring, have included a freeing of Auk and Chenille, and their travel \nto Blue in Horn's Lander?  Could Jahlee have fed on Chenille as she wandered \naround Blue, seeking drink to cope with the probable death of her adopted \nchildren at the hands of the inhumu?  Perhaps the narrator didn't simply leave \nAuk and Chenille at the mercy of the Triviguantis on Green.\n\nOK, enough for now.  I hope someone will have something to say about some of \nthis stuff.\nMarc Aramini"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}