Juturna (and nenuphars)

David Duffy · 10 Apr 2006, 04:42 · from 2006-April.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: David.Duffy at qimr.edu.au (David Duffy)
Date: Mon, 10 Apr 2006 14:42:36 +1000 (EST)
Subject: (urth) Juturna (and nenuphars)
In-Reply-To: <4439B9DC.3030402 at io.com>
References: <20060409095349.91346.qmail at web54207.mail.yahoo.com>
	<BAY104-F153D08C9ACB8B783DA61F296CF0 at phx.gbl>
	<1f7617370604091229y1b3c75d2i3824274c793d3beb at mail.gmail.com>
	<4439B9DC.3030402 at io.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.58.0604101405340.4796 at orpheus.qimr.edu.au>

On Sun, 9 Apr 2006, Jeff Wilson wrote:
> Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:
> > On 4/9/06, Tristan Davenport <tristan_davenport at hotmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >>(Question: Why are the plants
> >>on Urth pale, while those on the moon apparently quite green?)
> >
> > Purely speculation but -- Lune has a less dense atmosphere, so
> > the surface receives more insolation.
>
> Perhaps, but there's no guarantee that there are any plants still on
> Lune at the time of the narrative. Conflation and  multiplication of
> identities over ages is a very strong theme here as in other Wolfe.
>
> The green color could be something else entirely, [SNIP]
>
> The real answer is of course that the author really likes to write about
> blue planets with bright green companions, as he does in 5HC and SS.
>

It seems perfectly possible to me that the present plant life can strike
one as pale when seen up close, but their underlying green visible en
masse from a distance.  But only science fiction readers would worry
about rationalizing such a cool effect ;)  Anyway, there are plenty of
descriptions of "green" greenery in BOTNS, plus heat and humidity in the
"true jungle at the waist of the world", so insolation hasn't
dropped that much.

David Duffy

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net