Digest urth.v028.n103

David Duffy · 03 Dec 1999, 00:38 · from urth-v0028.mbox · original

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: David Duffy <davidD at qimr.edu.au>
Subject: (urth) Re: Digest urth.v028.n103
Date: Fri, 3 Dec 1999 10:38:43 +1000 (EST)
Message-ID: <urth-v0028-0585 at digest.urth.net>
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>=20
> Or Paul Park, who dusted off Tommy Gold's discredited theory on hydrocarb=
on
> formation (Park's "sugar rain"), as well as tucking in a few earlier age
> skiffy artifacts like a car that runs on gunpowder (I thought that Park
> might have actually thought something up with this item, until I saw a
> literature survey and learned better).  Sharing this trait with Gene Wolf=
e;
> maybe Wolfe's motto should be "Never let science get in the way of story."
> (But with Wolfe I also sense that he is impishly playing with the fickle
> nature of science vogue.)
>=20
> =3Dmantis=3D
>=20

In defence of Park, it is pretty clear that words like "horse" and
"petrol"  don't refer to the mammal and hydrocarbon we know and love. =20
Perhaps destrier would have been better, but doesn't give the frisson when
you realize halfway through (about the claws IIRC).  I decided gunpowder
must be another translation.  My gripe is after reading Park then
rereading the Helliconia set.

David Duffy.


*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

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