The green man is fake

António Pedro Marques · 17 Jan 2011, 01:00 · from 2011-January.txt.gz

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From: entonio at gmail.com (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Ant=F3nio_Pedro_Marques?=)
Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2011 01:00:49 +0000
Subject: (urth) The green man is fake
In-Reply-To: <COL105-W3402FE256D452FE443441485F40 at phx.gbl>
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Message-ID: <4D3394C1.4060304 at gmail.com>

Pedro Pereira wrote:
> 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.

But I don't mean that GW can't err or that he somehow is privy to advanced 
science of whose toys he gives us some glimpses. What I mean is that he 
isn't the sort to include conspicuous stuff in his stories just for the sake 
of including it. All evidence I've seen so far suggests that when he does 
include something, it's for a reason, and it's well thought out. He can of 
course get some details wrong, but if there is some apparent egregious error 
the odds are that there is a reason for it.

In the case of the green man it can even point to the fact, as the OP seems 
to have said, that he isn't completely reliable.

> 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.

Enter whatsisname's laws.
This last point is the important one, and a very important one at that. What 
I can say is that it's a trade-off. GW doesn't seem to just write what he 
pleases with no rhyme or reason; there seems to be logic behind the edifice 
and its pursuit tends to be rewarding. Of course, at some points it all may 
look like smoke and mirrors, but the key word, I think, is trust.

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