Tzadkiel/Melek Taus

Gerry Quinn · 14 Jul 2010, 12:00 · 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: gerryq at indigo.ie (Gerry Quinn)
Date: Wed, 14 Jul 2010 13:00:11 +0100
Subject: (urth) Tzadkiel/Melek Taus
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><4C3D37A7.2000107 at io.com>
	<4C3DA034.8000003 at verizon.net>
Message-ID: <CEB940EA25C243D5A0A5EE58B61D2920@jill>


Baldanders has an anti-gravity belt too.

- Gerry Quinn


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "David Stockhoff" <dstockhoff at verizon.net>
To: "The Urth Mailing List" <urth at lists.urth.net>
Sent: Wednesday, July 14, 2010 12:32 PM
Subject: Re: (urth) Tzadkiel/Melek Taus


>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.
>>
> _______________________________________________
> Urth Mailing List
> To post, write urth at urth.net
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>

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