Tzadkiel/Melek Taus

David Stockhoff · 14 Jul 2010, 11:32 · from 2010-July.txt.gz

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From: dstockhoff at verizon.net (David Stockhoff)
Date: Wed, 14 Jul 2010 07:32:04 -0400
Subject: (urth) Tzadkiel/Melek Taus
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I always suspected Wolfe of deliberately using pulp cliches in BotNS. I 
had no idea he applied the principle so thoroughly. It almost has the 
effect of reading about ancient, clever technologies like ballistae and 
water clocks.

Jeff Wilson wrote:
>
> 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 Wolfe's deliberate use of this outdated 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.
>

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