Urth Digest, Vol 50, Issue 42

Dave Tallman · 27 Oct 2008, 12:06 · from 2008-October.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: davetallman at msn.com (Dave Tallman)
Date: Mon, 27 Oct 2008 06:06:33 -0600
Subject: (urth) Urth Digest, Vol 50, Issue 42
In-Reply-To: <6.2.1.2.1.20081026111111.02c4af30 at pop.central.cox.net>
References: <6.2.1.2.1.20081026111111.02c4af30 at pop.central.cox.net>
Message-ID: <4905AEC9.3030806 at gmail.com>

Dan wrote:
> I don't think Woldercan is outside the galaxy. My statement was one of 
> incredulity. I've since reread the last two paragraphs and suppose a great 
> deal of time passed between them. I'd assume that she visited Gid on 
> Woldercan and realized he didn't really love her. Distraught over the loss 
> of both men in her life, her career, her faithless friends, health, youth 
> etc etc, she set off on a one way trip to oblivion. What she said to Gid 
> about driving his hopper would seem to resonate with this method of suicide.
>   
I think Gid still loved her even after the loss of her mojo, but she 
might not love him, at least not enough to turn from her grief over 
Bill. The Pygmalion reference on p. 81 suggests this is an Eliza / Henry 
/ Freddy love triangle. In the original play, Eliza marries Freddy.

> One could try to make the case that Gid took pity on her and maybe told or 
> taught her what she could do to resurrect Wally somewhere where the laws of 
> physics would allow it.  But the last line doesn't seem to be an invocation 
> as much as a cry of despair.
>   
Even with different laws of physics I doubt Gil would think they could 
resurrect the dead. But if she got far enough away and could send an 
ethermail she might be able to send Bill messages back in time, and 
might hope to change the past. From the point of view of an object 
moving relative to us a long distance away, events that are in the past 
to us can be present or future to it. The paradoxes involved are one 
reason that relativity does not allow FTL travel or messages. Wolfe 
instead allows FTL and the time paradoxes.

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