Problematic element in chronology

António Pedro Marques · 30 May 2011, 01:21 · from 2011-May.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 (=?utf-8?Q?Ant=C3=B3nio_Pedro_Marques?=)
Date: Mon, 30 May 2011 02:21:14 +0100
Subject: (urth) Problematic element in chronology
In-Reply-To: <919CCDA1A13748D3885C08CACA98A8FF@jill>
References: <87E792FA008E4A679A9EFA68176C4976@jill>
	<4DE0BB7C.2060406 at gmail.com>
	<919CCDA1A13748D3885C08CACA98A8FF@jill>
Message-ID: <ACEAA57F-D428-4FB2-B650-33276F9B59D8 at gmail.com>

No dia 28/05/2011, ?s 19:42, "Gerry Quinn" <gerryq at indigo.ie> escreveu:
> From: "Ant?nio Marques" <entonio at gmail.com>
>> Gerry Quinn wrote:
>>> On Blue, SilkHorn explains to prospective astral travellers that they
>>> can, if they peer for some time, see a dim red star - this is of course
>>> Sol, etiolated by the black hole inside it.
>> 
>> But we only have the narrator's word for it, and the narrator isnt omniscient.
> 
> True enough... but in most Wolfe including all of the Solar Cycle, we only have the narratopr's word for *everything*.  One has to ask why he should lie, or make a mistake?  And if he hasn't seen the star, why should he say it is visible, whereas if he has, why should he mistake a particular star for Sol?

I think it's reasonably obvious: he visited a red sun, he saw a red sun in the sky, bingo, he thinks they're the same. That's just one possible explanation which I find more plausible than a GW oversight. 

> 
>>> On the whole, I put this down to Wolfe not fretting too much about the
>>> details (...)
>> 
>> I don't think it's that.
>> 
>> I think GW fretts paranoidly about the details when the details matter.
>> 
>> When the details are unimportant I think he nontheless handles them with some care.
>> 
>> When, as in this case, the details depend on knowledge no one has within the story, he's free and willing to improvise.
> 
> But SilkHorn must have chosen the star for some reason - he hardly picked it at random.  If he incorporates some of Pas, albeit not yet fully assimilated, it may be that he has access to full knowledge with respect to the Whorl's trajectory..

Interesting, but I don't recall his having access to special knowledge anywhere else. 

> 
>> When the details depend on knowledge no one has period, he's almost obliged to improvise. One of the things that makes 'hard' sf so ridiculous is its datedness. As-of-time-of-writing scientific consensus dates a work even more than cassette tapes do. Constraining a story by scientific boundaries is not different from constraining it by technological ones.
> 
> The speed of light and the distance from which the Sun is visible aren't going to change with tomorrow's research.  Some science is permanent.

Hence my having said you can't go too much against some basic stuff. 

> I think he either (1) didn't think of this point,

Not in character. 

> (2) supports a 350-year chronology between Typhon and Severian,

Makes no sense to me. 

> or (3) thought it would be cool to have Sol visible even if the physics doesn't work.

...and thought to himself there would be no dearth of possible explanations so let's do it. Mirrors? Folded space-time?

>  I think Wolfe is quite happy to gloss over lots of dodgy science if it fits the story (realistically, it's obvious - leaving aside physics for the moment, absorbing not just memories but *memories coordinated into a personality* by eating corpses is obviously impossible.

So we think, but then again it's not like we've much of a portfolio to show as a species.

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