Urth Net

← back to the conversation

(TBOTN) Utter speculation

James Jordan · 19 Jun 2003, 18:23 · from urth-v0306.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: James Jordan <jbjordan4 at cox.net>
Subject: Re: (urth) (TBOTN) Utter speculation
Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2003 13:23:53 -0500
Message-ID: <urth-v0306-3499 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0306/3499.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

At 12:47 PM 6/19/2003, you wrote:
>I've been thinking about the Wall of Nessus and
>Baldander's assertion (ch. 35 of Shadow) that the open
>space inside the walls wasn't for Nessus' expansion.
>But something about the sheer size and height of the
>walls made me wonder how far off it would be to
>suggest that Nessus wasn't always a city but that it
>was initially (possibly) one huge space pad. Assuming
>that the walls are circular, then would it be possible
>that what we have is some kind of base for a huge
>cylinder, like...the Whorl?

         I thought the Whorl was a hollowed out asteroid, thus made in=20
space. But the rest of your suggestion makes some sense. Even ordinary=20
rockets blasting off might require a high wall, to stop noise pollution if=20
nothing else. Typhon would have launched a LOT of ships to populate and=20
supply Whorl. (But maybe we're both forgetting something.)
         An awful thought just hit me: Doesn't *Starship Troopers* start=20
off in Buenos Aires? Naw, it can't be. Nessus is the city of Borges, not of=20
Heinlein.

Nutria


--=20




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