Wall of Nessus

David Stockhoff · 15 Jun 2010, 00:02 · from 2010-June.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: dstockhoff at verizon.net (David Stockhoff)
Date: Mon, 14 Jun 2010 20:02:51 -0400
Subject: (urth) Wall of Nessus
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTim5E_9nwYRodD9bWCjwCjuKi3NpPXLQW6kORUHC at mail.gmail.com>
References: <000901cb080c$a24bd6a0$3dd14a0c@rclackey>	<AANLkTimNF_7phiZuvwCMYZObOBCVpmbPVbROd7kc1Hq4 at mail.gmail.com>	<006601cb0879$4ddd39c0$59cc4a0c@rclackey>	<AANLkTilLT4407kUNfZU4wY0V73RjJAk-UllkDYkyuiHT at mail.gmail.com>	<00b101cb0b91$16331100$bacf4a0c@rclackey>	<C04E9C844995425CA3A67B647E6007B8@jill>	<00bb01cb0be8$c9fcd7a0$92ce4a0c@rclackey>
	<AANLkTim5E_9nwYRodD9bWCjwCjuKi3NpPXLQW6kORUHC at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <4C16C32B.8010503 at verizon.net>

I think Severian alludes to this.

Jack Smith wrote:
> A 9-mile-high wall would cast a long shadow across the city while the 
> sun was rising or setting.
>
>
> On Mon, Jun 14, 2010 at 1:41 PM, Roy C. Lackey <rclackey at stic.net 
> <mailto:rclackey at stic.net>> wrote:
>
>     Gerry Quinn quoted and wrote:
>     > > At one point in URTH Sev, going on about the size of the
>     mirrored sails
>     on
>     > > The Ship, said that the Wall was "a few leagues in height and
>     a few
>     > > thousand
>     > > long" (p-103). Bah! That's a Big Dumb Object.
>     >
>     > Too big.  I prefer to maintain my original assumption that the
>     Wall is of
>     > ordinary height and Severian made a typo.
>
>     It's not a typo. Sev also went on about the Wall's improbable height
>     (clouds; the few birds that could fly over it) just as the theater
>     troupe
>     got to the gate. The gate itself is like a huge cave in it.
>
>     James Wynn wrote:
>     > What would the radius of the city need to be for a wall of that
>     height
>     > to disappear beyond the horizon at ground level?
>
>     Mantis made some calculations along these lines, based on
>     scattered comments
>     in the books about the Wall's height, in the Wall entry in LU2.
>
>     And later:
>     > I presumed that Wolfe would use the "Roman" league which is 2.22
>     km or
>     > 1.4 miles. It's still to tall for "several leagues".
>
>     FWIW, in an appendix to CLAW, Wolfe said that his use of league
>     means a
>     distance of "about three miles".
>
>     -Roy
>
>     _______________________________________________
>     Urth Mailing List
>     To post, write urth at urth.net <mailto:urth at urth.net>
>     Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>
>
>
>
> -- 
> Best wishes,
> Jack
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> Urth Mailing List
> To post, write urth at urth.net
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>   
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
>
> ---
> avast! Antivirus: Inbound message clean.
> Virus Database (VPS): 100614-0, 06/14/2010
> Tested on: 6/14/2010 2:12:49 PM
> avast! - copyright (c) 1988-2010 ALWIL Software.
> http://www.avast.com
>
>
>
>
>

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