Typhon & Whorl

Andy Robertson · 22 Dec 2007, 15:02 · 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: andywrobertson at clara.co.uk (Andy Robertson)
Date: Sat, 22 Dec 2007 15:02:48 +0000
Subject: (urth) Typhon & Whorl
In-Reply-To: <BAY106-W2974C6FC2EC2AD3C19CD87855E0 at phx.gbl>
References: <BAY106-W274FA780C45AB86EAE643D855E0 at phx.gbl>
	<740660.10201.qm at web58210.mail.re3.yahoo.com>
	<BAY106-W248D0F07970ADF551099FE855E0 at phx.gbl>
	<BAY106-W7A63C2E37479C9BC82860855E0 at phx.gbl>
	<6263.24.119.55.228.1198265652.squirrel at webmail.io.com>
	<BAY106-W2974C6FC2EC2AD3C19CD87855E0 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <E1J65sG-0001X4-Ih at oceanus.uk.clara.net>

Pedro Pereira writes: 

> 
> I do agree that wolfe is very well read comparing to the majority of writers these days. Still, he is not perfect and far as the geology part of things go, I find many inconsistencies. 

Maybe it's time to reiterate something I am sure we all already understand 

Writers rarely know exactly what they are going to create when they start 
out in a story. 

Like most really devoted artists, Wolfe writes whatever his internal muse 
dictates and then plasters enough "machinery" around it to create a 
plausible suspension of disbelief. 

Thus, the state of the Sun in the New Sun books can not be justified 
scientifically. It's actually a "Dying Earth" type sun like that in Clark 
Ashton Smith or The Night Land.   It's not explainable by real physics. 

Thus, the Long Sun books started as in a completely different universe from 
the New Sun.   Typhon popped up and the whole Long Sun connection was 
retconned subsequently. 

Fundamentally science fiction is **not** based on science, whatever analysts 
of the genre try to pretend.  It's a sub-class of wonder tale that uses 
science, not magic, as bullshit/excuse/enabler: nothing more. 

Scientific inconsistencies are inevitable and, really, irrelevant.  Unless 
they are just stupid and graceless.  Which Wolfe is not. 

I'm not posting this because I think it will be news to anyone, but because 
we need to be regularly reminded. 

 - hartshorn 

http://www.thenightland.co.uk 

01273-488272 / 0777-214-9545

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