The green man is fake

António Pedro Marques · 16 Jan 2011, 22:52 · from 2011-January.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: entonio at gmail.com (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Ant=F3nio_Pedro_Marques?=)
Date: Sun, 16 Jan 2011 22:52:38 +0000
Subject: (urth) The green man is fake
In-Reply-To: <COL105-W9BD6881AEB611BCA66D0185F50 at phx.gbl>
References: <SNT123-W61147465C4658444B748E8CFF50 at phx.gbl>
	<COL105-W9BD6881AEB611BCA66D0185F50 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <4D3376B6.6030102 at gmail.com>

Pedro Pereira wrote:
> Jesus guys/gals, this is a fantasy work, not "hard-scifi". IMHO you
> people are reading way to much into Wolfe when it comes to the actual
> science portrayed in the books. But that's just me.

For the reasons that have been recently adduced, I think the books' 
portrayals of science are to be taken very seriously. In fact, I'd say 
that's one of the important things there - where other authors may fashion 
talking turnips out of thin air if they need them, GW only does it when he's 
got a very good rationale for them. A talking turnip in a GW book isn't a 
deus ex machina, it's an invitation to find its backstory.

There are a number of ways a green man can be engineered, even only looking 
at the naturally-evolved biological processes we have already uncovered 
around us. And we don't even know the specifics of this green man. How long 
is he supposed to last, for instance. Heck, there *are* animals without a 
gut. Some aren't parasites and don't feed, they just use up their energy and 
die. According to the Laws of 'Hard' (chuckle) SF, some author putting such 
animals in a story should edumacate hissel.

(The green man can even feed partially parasitically. Who checked the grass 
he's lain on? There is just no end to the possibilities.)

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