In a Pig's Eye

StoneOx17 · 18 Jul 2002, 23:17 · from urth-v0207.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: StoneOx17 at aol.com
Subject: Re: (urth) In a Pig's Eye
Date: Thu, 18 Jul 2002 19:17:38 EDT
Message-ID: <urth-v0207-1441 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0207/1441.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

"Charles Reed" <cmreed at link.com> writes

> I've been following the pretty high-level discussions going on
> concerning Silk-in-Pig, Silk-23 vs Silk-43, etc.  But at the risk of
> sounding both mundane and stupid, I need to ask a question regarding
> Silk giving his eye to Pig.

> Pig is a (smallish) giant, but a giant nonetheless.  He's what, maybe
> four or five feet taller than Silk?  Given this, Pig's head might
> reasonably be assumed to be twice as big (in diameter) as Silk's head,
> with eye sockets proportionately sized.  How plausible is it, then, that
> Silk's eye could be successfully transplanted into Pig's eye socket?  I
> don't pretend to know much about advanced physiological concepts, but it
> seems to me that Silk's eyeball would really have a lot of room in which
> to flop around.

> Any thoughts?

Wolfe addresses this (possibly by accident, although I doubt it) when=20
Silk/Horn is talking to the godling.  Silk is talking:

"Oreb can see even when it seems to me that there's no light at all."

There was no reply, and he wondered whether the godling had heard him. =20
"Oreb's eyes are larger than mine," he continued gamely, "though Oreb is so=20
much smaller.  Your eyes seem very small to me, but that's only because the=
y=20
are small in proportion to your face.  Each must be the size of Oreb's head=
."

The lesson to be taken from this, of course, is that the size of the eyes o=
f=20
giants and godlings increases disproportionately slowly, so Pig's eyes coul=
d=20
be only slightly larger than Silk's. =20

Until Charles asked his question, I had assumed that the discussion of the=20
size of the godling's eyes was just incidental detail, and/or speculation o=
n=20
how physical proportions would change in giants (after the excerpt above we=20
find that the godling's reaction time and speech are slower than Silk's). =20
Now, I see that Wolfe's also very cleverly slipped in the answer to an=20
objection someone might raise about an event that happens half a book later=
. =20
I am impressed!

-- Stone Ox

--=20

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