The green man is fake

Pedro Pereira · 17 Jan 2011, 00:40 · from 2011-January.txt.gz

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From: domus_artemis at hotmail.com (Pedro Pereira)
Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2011 02:40:14 +0200
Subject: (urth) The green man is fake
In-Reply-To: <4D3380C8.8000004 at io.com>
References: <SNT123-W61147465C4658444B748E8CFF50 at phx.gbl>,
	<COL105-W9BD6881AEB611BCA66D0185F50 at phx.gbl>,
	<4D3380C8.8000004 at io.com>
Message-ID: <COL105-W3402FE256D452FE443441485F40 at phx.gbl>

Hey, I'm all for it. I just think that it is a bit too much when people analyse every little bit of info from the books expecting it to be fully explainable and scientifically 
demonstrable as if Wolfe was writing a scientific paper. It's not the exercise in itself, notice; it's the unchakable "belief" (for lack of a better word) from some posters (no one in particular) that if Wolfe writes it then it has to be 100% scientifically sound and interpreted literaly. Kind of reminds me of a discussion a few years ago when some people were trying to discover "when" on Urth was the story set (in relation to our present time) by looking at descriptions of geology, geography, stratigraphy (!!!), etc in the books. Wolfe certainly thought about some of this stuff so that the book feels coherent, but expecting descriptions to be used as fully workable data to derive such interpretations is really taking the" Word of The Man" a bit to far.

As for the Green Man, I don't remember what was in the books fully, thats why I said "If I remember correctly". Anyway, assuming that he lives from photosynthesis alone, he could even be "the Black Man" and fully use all the pigments available to him to properly extract solar energy; it still wouldn't change a thing. As for the idea that he could use other "means", "efficient storage", that we don't know "everything about everything" in science and so on, the problem is that if we go in that direction then we can as well write whatever we want and then just say that maybe someday we will find things we can't even imagine now, like atomic energy some decades back. In that case, even fantasy becomes science and the exercise we are indulging in turns useless.

Pedro

> Date: Sun, 16 Jan 2011 17:35:36 -0600
> From: jwilson at io.com
> To: urth at lists.urth.net
> Subject: Re: (urth) The green man is fake
> 
> On 1/16/2011 3:50 PM, 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.
> 
> Its nice to find an answer that works with the story and with the "real 
> world", or at least reduce things to the single Wellsian impossibility.
> 
> -- 
> Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
> Computational Intelligence Laboratory - Texas A&M Texarkana
> < http://www.tamut.edu/CIL >
> _______________________________________________
> Urth Mailing List
> To post, write urth at urth.net
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