Future Echoes: Hut in the Jungle +

John Watkins · 20 Mar 2009, 16:54 · from 2009-March.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: john.watkins04 at gmail.com (John Watkins)
Date: Fri, 20 Mar 2009 12:54:46 -0400
Subject: (urth) Future Echoes: Hut in the Jungle +
In-Reply-To: <W6763720110209521237567738@webmail42>
References: <W6763720110209521237567738@webmail42>
Message-ID: <93d4039f0903200954r1cd8272j2f765b8ae676e706 at mail.gmail.com>

Dorcas thinks that the Claw works by reversing time.  I've always thought
that that was wrong-headed--that it just works because it's divine
power--magic.

Now that I read this passage, however, I'm starting to come around to
Dorcas's view.  My knowledge of physics is pretty minimal, but I have this
vague idea that time slows down as one speeds up and would actually go
backwards if one could exceed the speed of light, which of course is
impossible.  But if it *weren't *impossible, it would still be *impractical
*because of the tremendous amount of energy it would take...unless one had
the ability to channel some kind of divine energy, flowing from a higher
plane of existence, much like Severian does.  Maybe that's *exactly *how the
Claw works, and this thing about the flower leaping into being is a hint of
that.

On Fri, Mar 20, 2009 at 12:48 PM, Son of Witz <sonofwitz at butcherbaker.org>wrote:

>
> >-----Original Message-----
> >From: Adam Thornton [mailto:adam at io.com]
> >Sent: Friday, March 20, 2009 09:44 AM
> >To: 'The Urth Mailing List'
>  >Subject: Re: (urth) Future Echoes:  Hut in the Jungle +
> >
> >
> >On Mar 20, 2009, at 11:38 AM, Son of Witz wrote:
> >
> >> "Beside me, Dorcas plucked a water hyacinth and put it in her hair.
> >> Except for the vague spot of white on the bank some distance ahead,
> >> it was the first flower I had seen in the Garden of Endless Sleep; I
> >> looked for others, but saw none. Is it possible the flower came into
> >> being only because Dorcas reached for it? In daylight moments, I
> >> know as well as the next that such things are impossible;"
> >
> >So, it's not hyacinths.
> >
> >Oh.  Hyacinth.
> >
> >Um.  Anyway, so, it's not hyacinths, but as long as we're doing
> >temporally-reversed scenes, how about when the monster drowns the
> >little girl who's tossing the flower petals into the pool in the
> >Karloff _Frankenstein_?  Here we have the time reversal where Dorcas
> >is produced from the pool, and then the flower petals.
> >
> >I'm probably just seeing spectres.
> >
> >Adam
>
>
> I seem to see the wispy edges of a ghost there...
>
> ~witz
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Urth Mailing List
> To post, write urth at urth.net
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20090320/2948aea4/attachment.htm>

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