Is it SF?

William Ansley · 15 Feb 2001, 01:25 · from whorl-v0012.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: William Ansley <wansley at warwick.net>
Subject: Re: (whorl) Is it SF?
Date: Thu, 15 Feb 2001 01:25:43
Message-ID: <whorl-v0012-0241 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/whorl/archives/v0012/0241.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

At 7:57 PM -0800 2/14/01, Dan Rabin wrote:
>William Ansley writes,
>
>>I was also bothered by the impossibly large size of the (big)
>>godling. Wolfe should make up his mind, is he writing science fiction
>>or isn't he?
>
>Should he?  Or should he just write?
>

Well, of course, this question is unanswerable, since it boils down=20
to a matter of opinion. But I will try to answer it below,=20
nonetheless.

There is probably no SF writer who has not made many blunders of=20
scientific fact, whether noticed by his or her readers or not. But, I=20
feel my complaint is valid. Wolfe makes enormous use of many of the=20
tropes of SF. This leads to an expectation that he is going to "play=20
by the rules" of SF. You may object that there are no such rules, or=20
at least no universally or even widely agreed upon ones, but I think=20
there is one rule that we may request that an author follow, a rule=20
that goes beyond SF: self-consistency. (If you think this is an=20
unreasonable request, then we must agree to disagree.)

Wolfe has pointed out several times in TBotNS that a giant human=20
being beyond a certain size (a size which the godling in RttW is=20
certainly beyond) would be unable to move and probably crushed to=20
death by his or her own weight, unless this giant mitigated the=20
effects of gravity by means of underwater buoyancy or microgravity.

So, my complaint really boils down to this: I am disappointed that=20
Wolfe is displaying lapses of consistency between the New, Long and=20
Short Sun books of which the matter of the godling's size is only one=20
example.

William Ansley
--=20
William Ansley

*This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun.
*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.moonmilk.com/whorl/
*To leave the list, send "unsubscribe" to whorl-request at lists.best.com
*If it's Wolfe but not Long Sun, please use the URTH list: urth at lists.best.=
com

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