moon information!Whorl

All right, guys. Finally got some real information that is pretty cool. At confluence, Green is 30,000 leagues away (every six years). At one point, someone mentions that at the moment of their comment Green is 80,000 leagues away. Ok here is the cool part: 30,000 leagues is 89,996 miles; 80,000 leagues is 239,988 miles. The distance from the earth to the moon on average is 239,000 miles! If we assume that Green is in a spiralling orbit around Blue, coming closer and then spiralling out to some distance, pulled by some forces in a very irregular orbit, but on average maintaining the same distance as the original moon (before the deterioration in Severian's time that brought the moon closer than 90,000 miles to the Urth!) I really think that the value of 80,000 leagues (almost EXACTLY the distance from the earth to the moon now) is NO COINCIDENCE. Marc Aramini

By what conversion? 30,000 Geographical Leagues Marine Leagues = US Mile 90,000.00 103,569.94 Statute Mile 90,000.18 103,570.15 Nautical Mile 78,208.02 90.000.00 (1' latitude) BR Nautical Mile 78,158.05 89,942.50 (Obsoltete 1970) Sea Mile 79,200.16 91,141.73 Roman Mile 97,865.71 112,321.62 The closest to your figure I can make it is marine leagues to the obsolete British Nautical mile. So first is there any reference in tBotNS, tBotLS or tBotSS which might give us a clue as to the meaning of "league" in those places? Then what means might they have to make any more than an estimate of the distance? Secondly league is a lovely word and we might trust that Wolfe uses is properly (in contrast to Jordan who made it 4 miles in the benighted Wheel of Time). But what is "properly"? To an American author the choice of British measure seems less likely than other posibilities. And what might make the more obscure nautical measure preferable to geographical measure? I'm inclined to think that it really is a coincidence. Matthew

One of the appendices to the BOTNS has a note on distances. I seem to remember that the author of the appendices just says "league" is hard to pin down from Severian's text. -Rostrum

I think we have to rethink what a "league" is here then. I assume that Green must have at least the mass of Lune/Luna, because it manages to hold on to an atmosphere thick enough for Urthian humans. (I don't have the figures available. If we were to put an atmosphere around the Moon, could it hold on to it? I don't know. But I'm quite sure nothing much smaller could.) But the problem is this. The tidal force is gravitational, which means that it increases or decreases as the square of the distance. If the Moon (or a body the size of the Moon) had a spiral orbit that came in as close as 90K miles, water tides would be immense and wouldn't be our biggest problem - we'd experience noticeable ground tides, i.e., earthquakes that would make the Richter scale pretty much meaningless. And if Green is bigger than the Moon, well --! Incidentally, and again I haven't done the math so I can't be sure, but I believe the much-larger mass of Earth/Urth would produce tides that would pretty much rip the Moon/Lune apart at that distance and we'd wind up with a ring instead of a moon. If this is right, then "30K leagues" has to be more than 90K miles for the Blue/Green system to work at all.

Green is obviously in a parallel orbit to Blue, occasionally overtaking it in its orbit. This takes years because the planets have nearly the same orbit and so nearly the same orbital period. Green and Blue are in close parallel orbits. They are !not! double planets like St Croix/St Anne or Ushas/Lune The similarity it thematic and mythic, not literal Andy Robertson ----- Original Message -----

At

Andy Robertson, this is your quote:

Ummm... why "obviously?" I don't see anything in the text which forbids a spiralling double.