More Specula Speculations

Mitchell A. Bailey · 09 Dec 1999, 23:07 · 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: "Mitchell A. Bailey" <MAB at lindau.net>
Subject: (urth) More Specula Speculations
Date: Thu, 09 Dec 1999 23:07:30
Message-ID: <urth-v0028-0604 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0028/0604.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Previously, while discussing Hethor=E2=80=99s mirrors I mentioned that the =
Good
Ship Tzadkiel did not appear to be a lightsail craft in anything like
the conventional sense. Lightsails would be better suited to generation
ships like the _Whorl_ since the acceleration would be so slight.=20

I had argued that if the sails resembled the mirrors of Father Inire, as
indeed they must to apport creatures as described, then the Ship must
actually be teleporting itself using the exotic properties of those
sails.

The explaination Father Inire offered Domnia about their principle of
operation is indeed nonsensical for conventional mirrors; the process he
describes would result in an interference pattern, not hyperdimensional
travel. But then again, Wolfe signals that the specula are not merely
perfect mirrors, but something much more. Severian, although he is not
an expert on these things, muses after Jonas=E2=80=99 departure:  =E2=80=9C=
How foolish
to call them mirrors... They reflect light indeed, but that, I think, is
no part of their true function. They reflect reality...=E2=80=9D

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

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