Green Is Urth Redux

Lee Berman · 12 Jan 2011, 17:45 · from 2011-January.txt.gz

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From: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee Berman)
Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2011 12:45:33 -0500
Subject: (urth) Green Is Urth Redux
Message-ID: <SNT123-W4F24669FD11D1021F8363CFF10 at phx.gbl>

>Dan'l Danehy-Oakes- If Lune is as big (more accurately, as _massive_) as a planet, then we
>have problems.

True but from my perspective there have always been similar massive problems. I've always felt
it would be impossible to sustain a world with rain forest jungles and pampas and herds of cows 
with a red sun. But there it is.

I've always been surprised and impressed at how well the Sun Series holds up under the scrutiny of
hard SF purists. Because of the red sun problem, I've never really been interested in that approach.

If Wolfe is willing to put a rain forest on a planet with a red sun for literary purposes, I think 
he'd be willing to create a planet-sized Lune to create a literary mirror of St. Croix and Ste. Anne.

This is the pattern I see. When Wolfe is forced to choose between hard science and a cool story device,
the story will win every time. I'm not saying that provides a definitive proof of Marc's hypothesis
but I find it a useful general guideline for understanding.

(I think Wolfe describes his process in an interview. He knows if his story was to be rigidly hard
science and detail-driven, he needed to provide a spaceship which brought the alzabo to Urth [and
presumably a story to explain why someone would want to do that and how one came to be running around
wild near Casdoe's house, etc.]. But he knew all that detail would make the story "lame" so he simply
skipped it. I'm glad he did. Those who need such things can invent their own stories of Vodalus ordering 
a new supply of analept and how the ship crashed and the cage opened....Me, I preferred Wolfe's 
explanation of how the Alzabo was a metaphor for his former mega-corp employer, Procter and Gamble. For 
me that's where the true human understanding of the *meaning* of the text is found)

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