Travelling North aka miscellaneous thoughts on Wolfe

brunians at brunians.org · 09 Jun 2010, 15:47 · from 2010-June.txt.gz

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From: brunians at brunians.org (brunians at brunians.org)
Date: Wed, 9 Jun 2010 11:47:06 -0400
Subject: (urth) Travelling North aka miscellaneous thoughts on Wolfe
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Message-ID: <f389bf9da394dcda98625d439c550970.squirrel at brunians.org>

I find it very difficult to take any purported Irishman who claims not to
believe in fairies seriously.

Especially when he is spurting this fanboy stuff all over the Gene Wolfe
list.

I believe that Wolfe describes the Book of the New Sun as science fantasy.

.


> I know that even 'hard' SF writers generally get a free pass when it comes
> to FTL travel.  But the method described in 'Urth of the New Sun' has two
> problems with it.
>
> First, there is the usual issue of travelling faster than light.  Special
> relativity is well established, and while it could be replaced by a new
> 'aether' theory, any such theory would have the same issue with a maximum
> speed.  We regularly push stuff to >99% of light speed and we know what
> happens.
>
> Secondly, the 'tacking' method of travelling faster than the wind works
> for
> sailboats.  But the analogy between wind and light radiation doesn't hold
> up
> because light does not exert pressure in directions orthogonal to its
> direction of travel, as moving air does.
>
> It's not a big issue, and in fact I mentioned it because I think it's a
> very
> nice idea.  But we can be pretty certain that no future technology will
> use
> it.
>
> - Gerry Quinn
>
>
>
> From: "Eugene Zaretskiy" <eugene.zar at gmail.com>
> On Mon, Jun 7, 2010 at 2:55 PM, Gerry Quinn <gerryq at indigo.ie> wrote:
>>
>> I don't think so. To travel to Yesod it is necessary to break the laws
>> of
>> physics in Briah by travelling faster than light (though the mechanism
>> proposed, tacking across the light from the stars, is cute but
>> unfeasible).
>
> I don't mean to pick on you, but I've always thought these types of
> statements were quite presumptive. Yours is a common argument to make
> against many ideas presented in science fiction. Educated folk mere
> decades ago explained in simple science why some of the technologies
> available today would be impossible to make. Yet the ingenuity of the
> modern inventor constantly foils such assumptions. I'm sure you could
> point out the fallacy in their thinking, but the fact remains that
> countless millennia have passed between now and the time these ships
> were "invented" (assuming someone, at some point, had to come up with
> the technology). Are you absolutely certain that it simply isn't
> possible that Severian's one-line explanation of how the ship sails is
> accurate?
>
> Not that it really matters. I just think it's rather groundless to
> predict that a proposed method of travel used millennia from now is
> unfeasible when we can't even predict what the weather tomorrow will
> be.
>
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