Fish and Caves

António Pedro Marques · 22 Dec 2010, 17:12 · from 2010-December.txt.gz

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From: entonio at gmail.com (=?UTF-8?B?QW50w7NuaW8gUGVkcm8gTWFycXVlcw==?=)
Date: Wed, 22 Dec 2010 17:12:28 +0000
Subject: (urth) Fish and Caves
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James Wynn wrote (22-12-2010 16:55):
>
>>>> Ant?nio Pedro Marques-
>>>> I just don't see any compelling evidence that dream travel is across
>>>> time. If it were, shouldn't the trip with Rigoglio be to the time he
>>>> left Urth?
>>>
>>> James Wynn-
>>> Really? So Silk seeing an astral flying Oreb in his room while the
>>> current Oreb is lame downstairs doesn't give you pause?
>>
>>
>> Ant?nio Pedro Marques-
>> It would if it were established that Silk saw an astral flying Oreb in
>> his room.
>
> Okay. What could possibly establish that for you? Oreb adamantly affirms
> that it wasn't him. His twin? His father?

So exactly how many people said it was an astral traveling Oreb before Short 
Sun got published?

>>> James Wynn-
>>> Incanto and Oreb
>>> in the grandmother's tale from her youth on the Whorl doesn't seem
>>> suspicious?
>>
>> Ant?nio Pedro Marques-
>> Suspicious but not definitive.
>
> How about an alternate theory?

Have none ever been presented that do not involve dream travel?
('Hey, I think Captain X stole the jewels.' 'I'm not so sure.' 'D'ya have 
any other suspect? Than let's arrest him!')

>>> The screwy timeline in the Book of the Short Sun (Sinews
>>> kids age not really matching, the times since Horn, Hoof, and Hide not
>>> matching), that doesn't make you think astral travel is temporal?
>>
>> Ant?nio Pedro Marques-
>> Not really. It's not like the incoherences in the narrative are
>> limited to the timeline.
>> All those can be evidence, but they're not compelling evidence. There
>> may be better evidence that I've missed.
>
> So, you're answer is "We can't explain everything in the books, so the
> obvious problems with time-line are not really indicative of temporal
> disjuncture." Once again. I don't know what sort of confirmation would
> put you over the edge.

Someone getting more evidence that Silk's vision was the Rajan and Oreb 
would go that way.

>>> James Wynn-
>>> Mucor takes hours to reach the Whorl by
>>> astral travel. Travel with the Rajan is instanteous. I suspect is Wolfe
>>> recognizes an ability for Time travel in order to accomplish this.
>>
>> So it would take ages for them to reach Urth, but the time is cut
>> short by time-travel, of which they are unaware, and yet they end up
>> on Urth at what is generally considered the present time? Time travel
>> that exactly compensates such a great offset, only to deposit them at
>> the present time, instead of at a point that would make more sense for
>> Rigoglio? (NB this applies whether one thinks the time they land on is
>> the present time or something else, as long as it's not close to the
>> time of Rigoglio's lifetime there.)
>
> I'm not sure what you are getting at. It seems you are defining how
> things would work if /you/ wrote the books. Wormhole travel is typically
> defined as simultaneous temporal and space travel (I only recently heard
> a physicist explain it) --thus the traveler arrives instantaneously at
> his new location as though he walked through a door without violating
> Relativity.

Well, *nothing ever* isn't a time and space travel. You're travelling in 
time and space right now.

> The point is that the Rajan's travels to Green and to the Whorl are
> unhinged from the Time-line and consequently Rigoglio's travels to Urth
> should be assumed to be as well.

You'll have to decide yourself. Do the Rajan's travels involve displacement 
in time or not?

> We have two examples of Time-travel by the Rajan and Oreb. We have a
> book with a serious time-line issue. There is no evidence to the
> contrary that the Rajan doesn't Time-travel. In a book with lots of
> mysteries, it's nice to have one mystery that is so resolvable.

You could make the case (you appear to do so above) that dream travel is a 
bit imprecise in what regards time. You might further try to find a reason 
for it to be greatly imprecise in some cases. But you haven't done that. And 
nothing as impressive as going back a thousand years, let alone thousands as 
per Marc's theory, has been argued, let alone convincingly.

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