Plausibility

Scott Wowra · 12 Nov 2009, 13:26 · from 2009-November.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: swowra at gmail.com (Scott Wowra)
Date: Thu, 12 Nov 2009 08:26:16 -0500
Subject: (urth) Plausibility
In-Reply-To: <4AFB6C1E.1020702 at verizon.net>
References: <mailman.1.1257977688.28662.urth-urth.net at lists.urth.net>
	<4AFB6C1E.1020702 at verizon.net>
Message-ID: <78918eac0911120526v31d6b3c6le77c839414e8ae6a at mail.gmail.com>

Able (not Abel) is a young teenager transformed into the body of a man.
Think about how well you wrote as a teenager. Did you understand all of your
motivations and have perfect insight into your actions? I know I didn't. In
contrast, Severian has the wisdom of multitudes. Given that, Sev certainly
has more book-smarts and insight into his motivations...he can view his
behavior from 1000s of different perspectives. Comparing their abilities to
self-reflect is a stretch and ultimately will make Able look like a dunce.

Someone commented that Able was a "brute and a bully." Not sure that
characterization holds water by the end of "The Wizard." He seems to be
fairly mature and certainly not a bully like he was early in The Knight. His
ultimate choice of desire over duty may not be heroic, but I tend to think
many of us would have made the same choice.

On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 8:59 PM, David Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net>wrote:

> That makes sense. Does it explain why Abel is so hard to follow? Certainly
> his material is bound to be looser, less subject to "modern" analysis. I was
> struck by Abel's lack of interest in his surroundings---it's very American
> in a way, and yet it fits the milieu.
>
> I think Severian's narrative is strengthened by a couple of other factors
> that tie into the plausibility principle but are separate from it. Mainly,
> he's Autarch, with a very clear place in the world and a biography that is
> more like a history or a hagiography. Every detail counts, as we know, and
> he knows it too. Wolfe may well have precise knowledge of Abel's comings and
> goings, but we don't necessarily need to.
>
> However, I can't argue that Severian has a better sense of the structure of
> his universe than Abel does. He may be better read, and probably learned a
> lot more as Autarch than he knew during his travels. But both characters
> have a distinctly medieval point of view. Severian attempts to explain what
> happened to him. Does Abel?
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Tue, 10 Nov 2009 23:23:56 +0100
> From: adamattman <adamattman at gmail.com>
> To: urth at lists.urth.net
> Subject: Re: (urth) Urth Digest, Vol 63, Issue 5
> Message-ID: <4AF9E7FC.30607 at googlemail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-15; format=flowed
>
> that's plausible.
>
> and it reminds me of this: (taken from:
> http://mysite.verizon.net/~vze2tmhh/wolfeint.html<http://mysite.verizon.net/%7Evze2tmhh/wolfeint.html>
> )
>
> Q: What is the difference between science fiction and fantasy?
>
> GW: Plausibility, really. Science fiction is what you can make people
> believe; fantasy is what people have to suspend disbelief for. Many
> physicists believe that there will never be a faster-than-light drive --
> it's impossible. But you can make people believe in one, since they don't
> know much physics. And there are some physicists who believe it is possible.
> If you talk about somebody genetically engineering unicorns, it's probably
> fantasy, because people don't believe in it. But it's so close that you can
> almost touch it; we're almost at the point where we can make a unicorn.
>
> So it's all a matter of plausibility. Do people think, "The future might be
> like this?" If so, it's science fiction. If they think, "This could never
> happen," that's fantasy.
>
>
>
>
> --------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> Urth Mailing List
> To post, write urth at urth.net
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>



-- 
Scott Wowra, PhD
639 Brooks Avenue
West Columbia, SC 29169
803 834 6796
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20091112/8c467f9b/attachment.htm>

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