Urth Net

← back to the conversation

Ansible Interview

James Wynn · 25 Jan 2009, 23:34 · from 2009-January.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: crushtv at gmail.com (James Wynn)
Date: Sun, 25 Jan 2009 17:34:51 -0600
Subject: (urth) Ansible Interview
Message-ID: <60016944C0A74B77B9BDFC5E98C39B25@GATEWAY>


>
>> The real problem, even if you're right, is that your theory involves
>> Wolfe making a much bigger aesthetic mistake than getting the geometry 
>> wrong.
>>
>> "Hmmm... lessee... by default, nothing in the Whorl will cast a shadow. 
>> Maybe I could use that as a subtle part of the description, to enhance 
>> the atmosphere of being in a artificial world different from the earth. 
>> Nah... there's a really convoluted way in which it's theoretically 
>> possible for shadows to exist. I'll just write as if I'd forgotten the 
>> whole thing, and let people construct the epicycles to rationalize it."
>
> You are assuming he thought it all strange that the Whorl would cast 
> shadows. If he made a rough model of his Whorl, he would have seen shadows 
> and just recorded what he saw.
>
> J


P.S. Trust me. There are far more important plot elements in The Book of the 
Long Sun that are far, far more subtly presented. 


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