Marc's smoking gun?

Jerry Friedman · 10 Dec 2002, 21:41 · from urth-v0212.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: Jerry Friedman <jerry_friedman at yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: (urth) Marc's smoking gun?
Date: Tue, 10 Dec 2002 13:41:02 -0800 (PST)
Message-ID: <urth-v0212-2382 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0212/2382.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

--- Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <ddanehy at siebel.com> wrote:
> (This is a somewhat artificial post ... I've self-edited but
> left in some weird stuff to indicate how my thought processes
> went.)
>=20
>=20
> Among other things, Marc points out
>=20
> > The underwater wall that surrounds the huge city Seawrack=20
> > speaks of: evidence of a flood.
>=20
> Okay ... This may or may not count as a smoking gun, but=20
> (to my own vast surprise, as I have a deep-seated _dislike_
> of the Blushas theory) I found it extremely persuasive, and=20
> in fact felt quite startled that I had not noticed it before.

More (but not as good) evidence of a flood is the Neighbor in the
tree that one of the twins sees through the Neighbors' ring.
Somewhere late in RTW.

> Later (in the same post), he wrote:
>=20
>=20
> > ... can't Silk in his astral travel go through the same
> > "white hole" or whatever to go back in time in his travels?
> > There you go: he travels far enough away to pass through that=20
> > dying/gestating black/white hole, and the red light he seeks=20
> > is through that barrier.  Since he travels with light, of
> > course he is drawn to the spiritual birth of the New Sun.
>=20
>=20
> I don't see any evidence that the Narrator's astral travel
> has anything to do with the White Fountain, but that might
> be another
>=20
> OH.
>=20
> Wow.
>=20
> _Duh!_
>=20
> Now I'm convinced. The whole thing makes sense, in an utterly
> Lupine way.
>=20
> How does the _Whorl_ wind up back at Ushas? How does so much
> time pass? What odd relativistic effects stretch the thousand
> years or so we have been talking about to many thousands, maybe
> millions?
>=20
> Let's answer that question with another question: As the=20
> _Whorl_ was heading out from the Urth system, what major
> spacetime anomaly was heading _toward_ it ... ?
>=20
> Hidden in plain sight. Marc, I hold the Blushas theory as
> fully plausible and highly probable. You da man.
...

This is very appealing from the text, but it doesn't seem to fit
with that interview that everybody's been quoting at
<http://www.ansible.demon.co.uk/cc/cc77.html>.

"3. What was Typhon's purpose in launching the Whorl and was the
Blue/Green [solar] system the intended destination? -- Knowing Typhon
as I do, he probably had at least half a dozen purposes; but
certainly one of the chief must have been self-aggrandizement -- to
return human kind to the stars would be a very great thing indeed.
Yes, the Blue-Green system was the intended destination."

Maybe I'm missing some way to reconcile it.
=20
> Elsewhere in the post, he wrote:=20
...

> > The abilty of Green to affect the tide at its closest.

Any large object would do that.

> This remains puzzling. If Green =3D=3D Lune, then the orbital
> mechanics get messed up ... I showed earlier that Green=20
> need not be nearer the Short Sun than Blue, but we need
> an orbit that puts them close together _only_ every -- uh
> -- however many years it was, my little grey cells seem to
> have failed me; and we need an explanation of how Lune
> became massive enough to hold an atmosphere -- massive=20
> enough that Horn doesn't notice a difference in weight=20
> when he travels there.

Wasn't it six years?  Anyway, I don't think we should worry
about celestial mechanics.  I'll bet Wolfe didn't.

> Actually, we can handwave this latter point and say that
> it must have happened _before_ Severian's time, because
> it obviously must hold an atmosphere in order for the
> "forests of Lune" to exist at all;

That strikes me as reasonable, not handwaving.

> but the orbital problem
> remains. I do not suppose it intractible, but I'd like a
> solution.
>=20
> Other problems remain:=20
>=20
> o If (as Wolfe has clearly stated) Severian's future is=20
>   the future of the Green Man, then where are his people,
>   (possibly the descendants of the Cargo?), and who are
>   the Neighbors?
> o Why have all the creatures on Urth developed extra
>   limbs while, apparently, remaining otherwise
>   recognizeable? (Handwaving about doubled chromosomes
>   _won't_ solve this one.)

Those two seem to me to be very good questions.
=20
> o What kind of evolution accounts for the inhumi? The
>   Neighbors? Those gosh-darned trees?

The same that accounts for Lyle Alzabo, that is, whatever Wolfe
wanted.

> o And what about Naomi?

Dorcas's mother?

Jerry Friedman

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now.
http://mailplus.yahoo.com

--=20

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