Faterh Inire Theory cont.

Jerry Friedman · 13 Dec 2010, 02:21 · from 2010-December.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: jerry_friedman at yahoo.com (Jerry Friedman)
Date: Sun, 12 Dec 2010 18:21:36 -0800 (PST)
Subject: (urth) Faterh Inire Theory cont.
In-Reply-To: <B40CC26366774FD797FB2242EAB80E68@jill>
References: <AANLkTim3FoVnWBPRg8oHkOdKcQwokiGJyWqEPtvx3chN at mail.gmail.com>
	<A8F690BC7D9244A7B50081E928396361@jill><2556B38DD612431FBE9AFB6C231E1728@jill>
	<4D037141.20004 at verizon.net><466503ECFA9B45968BD1A1DAA703C0E9@jill>
	<4D03B05E.3010403 at verizon.net>
	<6DE6C06432F84DF99D01D0F4FBC2B44D@jill><259897.54481.qm at web114710.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>
	<4D03F2E2.4090403 at verizon.net><1AF66D5C18F6435987404127733B14E3@jill>
	<4D053F5C.2080704 at verizon.net>
	<B40CC26366774FD797FB2242EAB80E68@jill>
Message-ID: <992313.88493.qm at web114715.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>

From: Gerry Quinn <gerryq at indigo.ie>

From: "David Stockhoff" <dstockhoff at verizon.net>

> Wooden ships used to be carefully and colorfully painted. And rooms in those 
>ships would be opened up for dinner and divided up for sleep, much as larger 
>rooms in older buildings have been divided up for cubicles or apartments for 
>about 100 years now.
> 
> But that's different. And imagine the problems you'd have with painted rooms in 
>a starship, even without flaking paint.

> Actually, I can't.
...

Me neither.

>> I like the thought that clouds relate to the Fortunate Cloud. But painted 
>>vaulted ceilings tend to
>> have skies painted on them. Such a ceiling could not be more ordinary in a 
>>palace.

I agree.  Everything we know about the antechamber seems normal for a palace in 
which an
underground waiting room was expanded as Jonas describes.

> It would be quite remarkable in a starship.
...

Not so much for the painting, in my opinion, as for the vaulting.  If rooms in a 
starship have vaulted
ceilings, you get lots of strangely shaped spaces between them and the floor 
above.  Of course,
those spaces /could/ be just right for the flux capacitors...

> Anyway, I don't want to get into a war over such details.  I am defending the 
>theory, but as I said I
> am not wedded to it.  And our interpretations of BotNS do not stand or fall on 
>the question of
> whether the Antechamber was or was not part of Jonas's starship.

No, wait!  This has to be do-or-die!

> But I ask again: has anyone any better explanation for Jonas's (confirmed) 
>architectural observations
> and the other things I mentioned?

He just recognizes that the antechamber looks like a bunch of rooms joined into 
one.

What details does he have?  The room is big, with a low ceiling, and he 
recognizes it as a drop ceiling.
There are lots of alcoves and niches around the walls, presumably the outlines 
of the original rooms,
and there's a uniform tile floor.  That might be enough.  Big rooms usually have 
high ceilings; this one's
low ceiling suggests the ceiling isn't the original.  And big rooms in a palace 
might be expected to have
neat, symmetrical plans; this one's irregular outlines, probably shaped like 
parts of rooms, would also
be a clue.

Since no pillars are mentioned, maybe only the walls are original.  You seem to 
be suggesting that
Jonas recognizes something about them, which Severian never mentions, as 
starship architecture.
But I think there's enough other information for him to figure out what 
happened.

Stay tuned for the next episode of This Old House Absolute.

Jerry Friedman

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20101212/47273b90/attachment.htm>

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