Tracking Song [Digest urth.v007.n016]

John Bishop · 04 Mar 1998, 07:48 · from urth-v0007.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: John Bishop <jbishop at alexus.zko.dec.com>
Subject: (urth) Re: Tracking Song [Digest urth.v007.n016]
Date: Wed, 04 Mar 1998 07:48:58
Message-ID: <urth-v0007-0589 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0007/0589.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

[Posted from URTH, a mailing list about Gene Wolfe's New Sun and other work=
s]

I seem to recall that Isaac Azimov once wrote an essay
in which he worked out that you wouldn't see the moons
of Mars from the surface as "hurtling Moons" in the
Barsoomian sense.  They're quite small, and thus dim.
I seem to recall that the larger is visible as a "star",
a point source of light, and moves slowly; the smaller=20
is a dim star and moves a bit less slowly.  [Anyone out
there have the collected essays from F&SF to check?]

If this is so, then Tracking Song can't be on Mars, barring
selenaforming of the moons at the same time the planet
is terraformed.

However, there's another possibility: just as Shadow takes
place on another Earth, Tracking Song could be taking place
on another Mars--one more useful for fiction ("Barsoom").
I know I'd prefer having our Mars be larger and wetter and
better provided with hurtling moons!

        -John

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