The Apu-Punchau Eclipse

Jeff Wilson · 12 Jun 2008, 07:46 · from 2008-June.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: jwilson at io.com (Jeff Wilson)
Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 02:46:46 -0500
Subject: (urth) The Apu-Punchau Eclipse
In-Reply-To: <16670.1213211693 at speakeasy.net>
References: <16670.1213211693 at speakeasy.net>
Message-ID: <4850D466.7070404 at io.com>

oblate777 at speakeasy.net wrote:
> 
> On Wed Jun 11 14:29 , Jeff Wilson <jwilson at io.com> sent:
> 
> 
>> I don't think we can square that figure with Sev's account of the masts 
>> and sails early in URTH. Also, regular solar sails of even that scale 
>> aren't adequate to propel the Ship out of the solar system in the time 
>> frame given. Ounces of thrust per acre of sail vs a mass large enough to 
>> have signifigant surface gravity yields excruciatingly tiny acceleration.
>>
> 
> Perhaps the sail technology used on the Ship is more exotic than a simple solar
> sail. 


Yes of ocurse it is, it has to be. The problem is, when the author 
starts making up non-physical stuff, and doesn't stop with Wells' single 
improbability, where *does* he stop? We need some sort of connection to 
physical reality to judge the inventiveness of a SF story, lest it slump 
into undifferentiated fantastic speculation.

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

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