Why the Whorl left early

Michael Straight · 17 Apr 2001, 11:24 · 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: Michael Straight <straight at email.unc.edu>
Subject: Re: (whorl) Why the Whorl left early
Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2001 11:24:36
Message-ID: <whorl-v0012-0625 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/whorl/archives/v0012/0625.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

On Tue, 17 Apr 2001, Adam Stephanides wrote:

> Also, given the level of technology on Blue, it will be a generation at
> minimum before the colonists there are capable of powering and maintaining
> Mainframe.  If it were to come down now, they might not even be able to
> preserve its physical integrity, since they can't stop the landers from
> being looted and rendered inoperable.
>=20
> In fact, I'm not at all sure what Horn means when he says that Mainframe
> will come to Blue.  We don't know, either, on what grounds he says this;
> it's not in his conversation with the surgeon.

I read this as metonymy (like when Jews refer to G-d as "Heaven"); he
means that the gods of Mainframe will come to Blue, presumably by
posessing humans or animals, not that some (big?) physical computer will
be brought to Blue.

And based on Horn's comments about the possibility of getting a sacred
window working on Blue, at least one of us (Horn or me) drastically
misunderstands how the things work.  That *would* require bringing
Mainframe itself to Blue.

-Rostrum

*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