This week in Google Alerts

Craig Brewer · 02 Nov 2011, 16:25 · from 2011-November.txt.gz

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From: cnbrewer at yahoo.com (Craig Brewer)
Date: Wed, 2 Nov 2011 09:25:01 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: (urth) This week in Google Alerts
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The actual years distinction doesn't seem to make much difference in terms of Urth's culture. The culture was that way at that time because Wolfe said it is. His fiction, his rules. We can rationalize how much culture is lost/forgotten/transmuted by bringing up whatever examples we like, but, in the books, if it changed that much in 20,000, then it did because that's how Wolfe conceives of cultural erosion/mutation.

But the question it does beg to me seems to be that of why the Sun is dying. In 20,000 years, it wouldn't burn out naturally, right? And if it was artificial, then who/why? That seems to be the real issue of the time lag, and I think it's been hashed out here before.

________________________________
From: David Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net>
To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
Sent: Wednesday, November 2, 2011 11:18 AM
Subject: Re: (urth) This week in Google Alerts

Of course. But what does that distinction impact, exactly?

We know that old cultures were revived after the computer age, and with 
them our old languages. These could not have and in fact did not survive 
20,000 years.

We know or suspect that the Commonwealth is loosely based on Argentina. 
"Millions of years" is not long enough for continental drift to reverse 
itself, for the Andes to erode, and for a new Andes to rise. That would 
take many hundreds of millions. Maybe that is in fact what we are to 
conclude, although to my knowledge no one has done so.

The 20,000-year figure is from Wolfe. I always thought it was way too 
low. Still, I don't buy hundreds of millions either. Alternative 
theories are available.

So, is Mantis just way wrong?

On 11/2/2011 11:52 AM, Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:
> Once again.
>
> TBotNS is far enough in the future that mountains containing the ruins
> of long-buried cities have risen. This is not on the order of 20 or 30
> thousand years; it is millions.
>
> On Wed, Nov 2, 2011 at 7:29 AM, Gerry Quinn<gerry at bindweed.com>? wrote:
>>
>> From: David Stockhoff
>>> I believe the 20,000-year figure is from Wolfe. Since no major changes
>>> could have occurred from "now" to Severian's time anyway, the
>>> significant changes are cultural, not geographic. Yet European languages
>>> are still spoken on the Whorl; even if they had to be revived for
>>> Typhon's purposes, they still survived that long.
>> Even in Severian?s time scholars retain some understanding of English, as we
>> know from Thea?s disquisition about the renaming of Verthandi and Skuld.
>>
>> The atmosphere of BotNS has always reminded me of Robert Silverberg?s
>> Nightwings, which is, if I recall correctly, set around the year 30000.
>> Here the names of certain cities (Rome and Jorslem) survive.? Just as in
>> BotNS, the world is pseudo-feudal with high-tech elements.? Earth is the
>> clapped-out remnant of a hubristic interstellar empire and is now under the
>> ownership of aliens.
>>
>> As far as I know Wolfe has never acknowledged any literary debt to
>> Nightwings, although it was published around 1970.? Of course it may well be
>> that he never read it and his and Silverberg?s visions evolved
>> independently, albeit obviously from similar roots in Vance and elsewhere.
>>
>> - Gerry Quinn
>>
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