The Apu-Punchau Eclipse

Roy C. Lackey · 12 Jun 2008, 09:05 · 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: rclackey at stic.net (Roy C. Lackey)
Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 04:05:56 -0500
Subject: (urth) The Apu-Punchau Eclipse
Message-ID: <003c01c8cc6b$896f5140$0acf4a0c at rclackey.stic.net>

Jeff Wilson quoted and wrote:
>> Dan'l is correct. The Ship has seven sides, the decks covered by "masts
>> beyond counting". (URTH, I, 2) Some of the masts are "separated by tens
of
>> leagues at least". (I, 6) Many sails are improbably *huge*:
>>
>> "Rising over the topmost sail as the New Sun of Urth
>> might someday rise above the Wall of Nessus (yet far, far
>> larger and more beautiful than even the New Sun can ever
>> be, just as that smallest and uppermost sail was an entire
>> continent of silver, compared to which the mighty Wall of
>> Nessus, a few leagues in height and a few thousand long,
>> might have been the tumbledown fence of a sheepfold),[...]
>> (XIV, 103)
>>
>> The Ship's overall size has to be on a planetary scale.
>
>I don't think this is supported by "Masts sprout from every deck, a
>hundred times taller than the Flag kepp of the Citadel," or by Severian
>being able to leap clear the distance from the deck to the startop
>wihtin a few minutes of indulging himself. (At least, he does not remark
>on the passage of time or become concerned over needing to eat or drink.)

Then your quarrel is with Wolfe, not me. The text says what it says. Like I
said before, the Wall of Nessus just can't be that tall and not be visible
from ground level virtually anywhere in the city, either.

>> This eclipse business just isn't that hard. All the Ship has to do is
travel
>> in a straight line between the sun and Urth, at the appropriate distance
to
>> achieve eclipse, and veer to one side to uncover the sun at the right
>> moment.
>
>A straight line with a sudden veer require the removal of gravity and
>inertia from the picture. Not that the Yesodis can't do that if they
>need to, but why bother with sails at all if you can do that?

Indeed. And why bother manning and operating the Ship at all when they can
use a "dimensional portal" (your term) to move people (and maybe planets)
from Yesod to Briah, and time-walk to anywhen?

-Roy

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