House Absolute

O'Donnell, Tim BOSI · 02 Dec 2008, 09:38 · from 2008-December.txt.gz

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From: Tim.O'Donnell at bankofscotland.ie (O'Donnell, Tim (BOSI))
Date: Tue, 2 Dec 2008 09:38:56 -0000
Subject: (urth) House Absolute
Message-ID: <63FB9AC7E0AEC7459DBCC99DC44247CA01F6AFF2 at BOSIDEXDB.Bankofscotland.ie>

Before I comment on the email below just a note on Wolfe and "hard" sci-fi.
While Wolfe doesn't go out of his way to burden every device with a hard science grounding, he is an engineer and does take physics into account.
I, for one, would doubt that there is little in his books that is physically impossible, but lots that employs theoretical principles that haven't been realised physically yet.
For instance, when Typhon and Severian are in the floater Typhon indicates that it is powered by an anti-gravity device.  Why would Wolfe go to the trouble of including this detail 
when he is going to plead Asmiov's law and just say "magic" for other instances?  (If this was the Star Wars universe the answer of course would be "the force").

Some of the most interesting speculation I have found in the archives has been around physics.  For instance, the link below is a discussion of how big the Whorl may be
based on the effects of the acceleration experienced by Silk in the floater.

http://www.urth.net/whorl/archives/v0007/0606.shtml

In response to the email below, I think that the geographical changes are what situate Urth so far in the future.  However I see nothing in the text to indicate that these are in fact normal geographical processes.
The Urth's core may have been cooled when the geo-thermal energy was in some way mapped.  (Where did the energy to create the Whorl come from?  And before that the star-faring civilisations
that rose and fell?).  Is it ever established who exactly put the black hole in the sun?  Could it have been a botched attempt to harness the energy of the sun?

Likewise the mountains containing evidence of past ages.  What struck me in this section of the job is how incredible the engineering job that created these mountains of Auturchs was.  Severian at one point
wonders how the machinery could have passed this way.  Technology that would allow an Auturch to carve their face in the mountain would surely allow them to create artificial mountains using whatever building
material was to hand (digging deep into the Earth's crust even to obtain the materials).

___________________________________________
From: John Smith <jsmith2627 at att.net>
Subject: (urth) How Far in the Future is Urth?
To: urth at urth.net
Message-ID: <260958.42436.qm at web180009.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

People seem to have significant differences of opinion as to how far in the future Severian's Urth is.   Is it a few thousand years in the future or a few hundred million?

I lean toward one million years for these reasons:

1.  The moon has been irrigated and now supports vast forests.  Changing a barren rock into a place that supports life would take a long time.
2.  Mining is done by digging up forgotten buried cities.   
3.  At some point in Claw, Severian climbs down a cliff, passing by layers of sediments that must have taken ages to lay down.
4.  Enough time has passed for star-faring civilizations to have arisen and fallen.
5.  Against the idea of hundreds of millions of years having passed, I would point out that there are still seven continents.
And North and South America seem to still be in the same relative positions.
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