Prior Race On Blue And Green

Adam Thornton · 17 Dec 2007, 04:01 · from 2007-December.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: adam at io.com (Adam Thornton)
Date: Sun, 16 Dec 2007 22:01:24 -0600
Subject: (urth) Prior Race On Blue And Green
In-Reply-To: <BAY108-W275652B037D481C5AC23EA96620 at phx.gbl>
References: <20071216120918.D2D4C22846 at mailserver9.hushmail.com>
	<8347.67.142.130.18.1197813720.squirrel at brunians.org>
	<BAY108-W2006748A58764432E53C4B96610 at phx.gbl>
	<BAY108-W37B727D65DE80CA0995B2996610 at phx.gbl>
	<BAY108-W17B982E0DCA3AEE81A84A696610 at phx.gbl>
	<3237.67.142.130.14.1197846112.squirrel at brunians.org>
	<BAY106-W631C6609F32399935DCF385610 at phx.gbl>
	<BAY108-W275652B037D481C5AC23EA96620 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <2D0D96F2-76CE-488C-9B40-9BC82128ECD8 at io.com>

On Dec 16, 2007, at 9:50 PM, Michael Dale wrote:
>
> Who is the Undine that exist on Blue? It is not Scylla if she is  
> also on Urth I think.  (so long that SilkHorn cannot time travel)
>
> I heard someone say that the undines put a blackhole in the sun.  I  
> don't think so since they want to survive on the Urth also.

I don't know that I like this idea, but it's a new one to me:

What if the Whorl never actually GOES anywhere?

I've wondered before what the acceleration means in terms of whether  
its bodies of water stay put, and whether that gives a maximum and  
minimum time for its trip.

But what happens if the Whorl just kinda wanders around the Solar  
System for a few centuries, or millennia, or aeons, and Silk's trip to  
meet Severian is "mere" time travel, not spatial travel?  What if Blue  
and Green *are* Earth and Venus in the future after the arrival of the  
New Sun?

I now need to think and read and see whether that's at all internally  
consistent.

Another sort-of-snarky point: what if TBot*S isn't _meant_ to be hard  
SF?  Maybe we're just supposed to read it as _The Dying Earth_ written  
by someone who can really, really write (look, I like Jack Vance too,  
but he's no Gene Wolfe), and who has read his Borges.

Adam
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20071216/24df5bce/attachment.htm

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