The Case for Mundanity

Jeff Wilson · 18 Dec 2007, 05:10 · from 2007-December.txt.gz

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From: jwilson at io.com (Jeff Wilson)
Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2007 23:10:54 -0600
Subject: (urth) The Case for Mundanity
In-Reply-To: <47671D14.4030801 at hyraxes.com>
References: <24440.20432.qm at web63915.mail.re1.yahoo.com>
	<47671D14.4030801 at hyraxes.com>
Message-ID: <4767565E.9020205 at io.com>

Dave Lebling wrote:
> I'm also on the mundane end of the spectrum as far as many of the minor 
> difficulties with chronology and sequence in the whole NS/LS/SS cycle, 
> which is that a series of books written over nearly twenty years, each 
> sub-series of which was unforeseen when the previous one was written, 
> are going to contain some problematic dissonances because, for all the 
> evidence to the contrary, Gene Wolfe is in fact human.

> He's not Hal Clement, so 
> he didn't sit down and calculate out all the geology and history, he 
> just wrote the story, and years later he wrote more stories that twisted 
> the chronology still more, and so on.

Absolutely. The books should not be taken as hard SF, and attempting to 
do so produces all sorts of paradoxes and contradictions. It came to me 
today that Ash is not the harbinger of the end of Urth, instead it is in 
fact the Green Man; rather than going to sleep under the ice, Urth would 
broil under a new sun 100 times brighter than the old, because that's 
how much light it would take to provide enough calories to sustain a 
person in a person's worth of surface area.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
< http://www.io.com/~jwilson >

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