The Dutch on Blue

Alastair Reynolds · 13 Oct 1999, 09:21 · from whorl-v0010.mbox · original

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From: Alastair Reynolds <areynold at estsa2.estec.esa.nl>
Subject: Re: (whorl) The Dutch on Blue
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1999 11:21:53 +0200 (MET DST)
Message-ID: <whorl-v0010-0106 at digest.urth.net>
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>=20
> 'Wijze,' in Dutch, means 'tune,' 'melody,' 'manner,' or perhaps most
> significantly, 'mood' (meaning here the grammatical sense, not the
> emotional--how, that is, a clause containing the verb in question [usually
> inflected] is related syntactically to other clauses in the sentence.)=20
>=20
> 'Strik,' who also hails from Dorp, means 'knot.'=20
>=20
> 'Knotted syntax' may be a happy coincidence here, but I doubt it.
>=20
> Robert Borski
>=20

"Wijzer" itself means pointer (according to my dictionary it also means
the hand of a clock). I think it can also mean guide, as in the kind of
leaflet you get in museums, but I'm less sure about that.

Re: Urth as our future Earth; doesn't Wolfe himself make this explicitly
the case in TBOTNS appendix where he talks about photographing buildings
which have survived many centuries of futurity? And I believe in one of
q&a sessions I have read, either on this list or on the web somewhere,
he said he envisaged Severian's time as being about a 1000 years from
now (which always struck me as too short a span of time, but never
mind).=20

I'm not sure there's much point trying to work out the flight time of
the Whorl to great precision, as I suspect Wolfe didn't necessarily
bother working all this out beforehand. After all, didn't someone on
this list pretty convincingly show that the Whorl's size/rotation
rate didn't make much sense?

I'm torn between reading posts and thinking I should delete them until
I've got my hands on my own copy of Blue!

Al
>=20

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