Claw Power in BOTNS

Michael Straight · 15 May 1998, 09:13 · from urth-v0011.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: Michael Straight <straight at email.unc.edu>
Subject: Re: (urth) Claw Power in BOTNS
Date: Fri, 15 May 1998 09:13:02
Message-ID: <urth-v0011-0051 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0011/0051.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

On Thu, 14 May 1998 m.driussi at genie.geis.com wrote:

> (and anybody else following this "how can the white fountain power
> the Claw in BOTNS when it doesn't exist yet, except possibly as much
> as a half dead/half live cat?" investigation),

[Theory about Severian getting power from Urth, Old Sun, etc.]
=20
> Anyway, here is a model that does away with many of the more thorny
> issues in the paradox of the half-dead/half-live white fountain.

While these ideas are tantilizing, I just wanted to go on record as really
liking the time-twisting ideas about Severian being able to use the white
fountain because it will exist in the future.   There's lots of good SF
precedent for that kind of thing -- take this passage from a Greg Egan
story ("Eugene") I read just yesterday [minor spoiler]:

 "You've invented time travel!"

 "No.  Suppose you fed the genetic profile of an embryo into a computer,
 which then constructed a simulation of the appearance of the mature
 organism; no time travel is involved, and yet aspects of a possible
 future are revealed.  In that example, all the machinery to perform the
 extrapolation exists in the present, but the same thing can happen if the
 right equipment--equipment of a more sophisticated kind--exists in the
 potential future.  It may be useful as a mathematical formalism, to
 pretend that the potential future has a tangible reality and is
 influencing the past--just as in geometric optics, it's often convenient
 to prentend that reflections are real objects that exist behind the
 mirrors that create them--but a formalism is all it would be.

 "So because you might invent such a divice, we can see you, and talk to
 you, as if you were speaking to us from the future?"  "Yes."

Probably complete nonsense, but I love it anyway.  (Most of Egan's stuff
has less handwaving than that, btw.  His short-story collection
_Axiomatic_ is quite mind-blowing; it plays with ideas of mind and
consciousness and identity that mix Daniel Dennett, Douglas Hoffsteader,
and Oliver Sacks with quite original stuff of his own).

-Rostrum

*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