The Ship

Gerry Quinn · 09 Jan 2012, 19:44 · from 2012-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: gerry at bindweed.com (Gerry Quinn)
Date: Mon, 9 Jan 2012 19:44:32 -0000
Subject: (urth) The Ship
In-Reply-To: <SNT123-W11B332B4A51C4A4C5A153BCF980 at phx.gbl>
References: <SNT123-W11B332B4A51C4A4C5A153BCF980 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <8DF4D3588ADA46209F3DC338D9ECBE10@Rover>



From: Lee Berman 


> The Ship may be big enough and all that but it is an unatural and unnecessary 
> addition to the story since a large body to block the sun already exists. When the 
> the white fountain arrives, it causes major cataclysms on Urth via "waves of 
> gravitation". Adding a moon-sized Ship to Urth's vicinity might cause similar 
> problems that locking the existing moon in place for a few extra hours wouldn't. 

I would say the opposite: stopping the Moon in its orbit would be a cataclysmic event.  And while the Ship is large, it is indicated to be about the size of an island ruled by a minor lord, which seems much smaller than the Moon.

> Further, Wolfe spends an inordinate amount of time adding a story component in 
> which Tzadkiel's ship parks outside the solar system and sends in a small tender
> to drop Severian off on Urth. Maybe he/she is just trying to avoid the  ship being 
> detected by Typhon but that seems pretty weak to me. As mentioned before, FB&O do 
> not appear on Urth at this time. They come later.

On the other hand, Wolfe mentions on two separate occasions that the Ship sometimes comes much closer in...

- Gerry Quinn


 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20120109/b0d79abf/attachment.htm>

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