Urth Net

← back to the conversation

size of erebus, et al.

Jeff Wilson · 19 Jun 2008, 20:45 · 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, 19 Jun 2008 15:45:02 -0500
Subject: (urth) FW: size of erebus, et al.
In-Reply-To: <BAY103-W240180D12425FF2A2B1153D7AA0 at phx.gbl>
References: <BAY103-W240180D12425FF2A2B1153D7AA0 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <485AC54E.3060200 at io.com>

b sharp wrote:
> 
>>
>> marc aramini says:
>>
>>> I always thought the retconned story of Theseus and the novascaputs with the
>>> enormous sea ship was indicative of the size of the monsters like abaia. the
>>> student's creation must face that enormous sea creature that dyes the ship.
>>> Those stories always seemed to reflect both thematically and factually to Severian
>>> 's main narative.
> 
> Though it is a mangled legend, I agree, keeping in mind that it is a naviscaput= ship
>  head monster, the big ship being only the tip of the "iceberg". I always assumed the
>  rest of his body extended down to the ocean floor, his "feet" roiling the benthos as
>  he walked. Seems plausible his entire size could be somewhat akin to a mountain's.

The giant keeps to channels on the island most of the time, doesn't he? 

I think he owes more to the other ur-story, the Battle of Hampton Roads, 
where the Monitor's considerable but not mountainous bulk remains at or 
below the waterline with only a 10 x 20 foot turret exposed.

-- 
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