The Dutch on Blue

'Wijze,' in Dutch, means 'tune,' 'melody,' 'manner,' or perhaps most significantly, 'mood' (meaning here the grammatical sense, not the emotional--how, that is, a clause containing the verb in question [usually inflected] is related syntactically to other clauses in the sentence.) 'Strik,' who also hails from Dorp, means 'knot.' 'Knotted syntax' may be a happy coincidence here, but I doubt it. Robert Borski *This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun.

"Wijzer" itself means pointer (according to my dictionary it also means the hand of a clock). I think it can also mean guide, as in the kind of leaflet you get in museums, but I'm less sure about that. Re: Urth as our future Earth; doesn't Wolfe himself make this explicitly the case in TBOTNS appendix where he talks about photographing buildings which have survived many centuries of futurity? And I believe in one of q&a sessions I have read, either on this list or on the web somewhere, he said he envisaged Severian's time as being about a 1000 years from now (which always struck me as too short a span of time, but never mind). I'm not sure there's much point trying to work out the flight time of the Whorl to great precision, as I suspect Wolfe didn't necessarily bother working all this out beforehand. After all, didn't someone on this list pretty convincingly show that the Whorl's size/rotation rate didn't make much sense? I'm torn between reading posts and thinking I should delete them until I've got my hands on my own copy of Blue! Al

*This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun.