Levels of meaning (was Re: Green Is Urth Redux)

Oh, aye. We're in agreement there; I was just tweaking this whole silly argument about whether there are domes on Lune or what. What really matters is that Lune stands green in the sky as a symbol of man's past engineering glory, to which Vodalus foolishly thinks he can restore the world. It is a doubled symbol of decadance: the technological decadance that has fallen so far from the ability to do such things; and the moral decadance that said "just because we can, we should." Agreed also that Wolfe's not going to let a hard-science difficulty stand in the way of a cool story point. (The alzabo itself is patently ridiculous on a hard-science basis, but chilling as hell as a monster and neat as a symbol of being devoured by The Machine.) But, he does take pains to make a lot of his story at least surface-plausible. (Well, maybe the alzabo isn't completely ridiculous: if it isn't a native animal of some far world, but bioengineered by humans to produce the analeptic...)