Tzadkiel/Melek Taus

Jeff Wilson · 14 Jul 2010, 04:05 · from 2010-July.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: jwilson at io.com (Jeff Wilson)
Date: Tue, 13 Jul 2010 23:05:59 -0500
Subject: (urth) Tzadkiel/Melek Taus
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTilICfr5mgKtuLGjuGQNmx0qs4JaP2lfaItGr46_ at mail.gmail.com>
References: <AANLkTiksy2xSZYAhIYNFOHZxQ8JNWq9nVnximiT_zHB_ at mail.gmail.com>	<AANLkTinL0Au5EU73SiBRhmZXv7CZrIVNbqqDW8oKgtvQ at mail.gmail.com>	<AANLkTilEW8QQYfHkf9vmhFpu36lZB8zLEO4EIC0VQTA8 at mail.gmail.com>	<AANLkTilhsYFDbHJRJ8wgUh3mXy-AmzOitOIPIkMOiYCD at mail.gmail.com>	<AANLkTikZpx43dwU63Ha_i_SwCxDBcRq_dRc5AqByKnEq at mail.gmail.com>
	<AANLkTilICfr5mgKtuLGjuGQNmx0qs4JaP2lfaItGr46_ at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <4C3D37A7.2000107 at io.com>

On 7/13/2010 9:53 PM, Cliff Judge wrote:
>     On Tue, Jul 13, 2010 at 5:05 PM, Cliff Judge <transentient at gmail.com
>     <mailto:transentient at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>      > Thanks for bringing this up, this gives me some food for thought
>     with regard
>      > to the "down is up" thing I am on about lately.
>      >
>      > E.g. Typhon throws Severian into the sled, they plummet
>     downwards, then
>      > arrive at the very top of Typon's mountain fastness, and Severian
>     asks
>      > Typhon how they could have come up so high, when they had just
>     fallen so
>      > far.
>
>     If I remember correctly, the Autarch's craft employs "anti-iron" as
>     some sort of contra-terrene matter that repels gravity. Maybe this
>     sled is made of such stuff and they are facing backwards?

Typhon responds, "Why should gravity serve Urth, when it can serve 
Typhon?" I interpret this as an adjustable antigravity effect, where the 
sled and Severian's viscera fall freely as the acceleration of gravity 
is reversed, then restored just in time for the sled to cease rising at 
its destination and then lock in place. The flier's buoyancy seems to be 
always present, but uses conventional action-reaction propulsion to 
move, causing the screaming noise that accompanies the hasty departure 
of of Vodalus , and explaining why people riding in them don't feel as 
though they are falling.

Reverse-matter buoyancy has made something of a comeback with Robert L. 
Foreward's notion of "negative mass", but at the time gravity-reversal 
of antimatter was an obsoleted SF device since word had gotten around 
the readership that antimatter was only electrically reversed, not 
gravitationally. Wolfe's deliberate use of this outdated concept 
alongside a similar but distinct outdted antigravity concept makes me 
wonder if the mirror-traveling trick of accelerating light and the 
reflected  objects across or beyond the universe was also a plot device 
previously used band then discarded by previous authors.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
IEEE Student Chapter Blog at
< http://ieeetamut.org >

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