From: "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes" 
Subject: Re: (urth) (TBOTN) Utter speculation
Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2003 11:42:09 -0700

>>= "Craig wrote this."
>= "Mantis wrote this."


> >Assuming
> >that the walls are circular, then would it be possible
> >that what we have is some kind of base for a huge
> >cylinder, like...the Whorl?

>Now this would be a rather insane (and, as far as I
>can tell) rather impossible way to build and "launch"
>a ship as big as the Whorl (which seems to be too
>massive to ever be "launched" from a planet).
>Still...why is the wall miles high and spread so far
>around the city?

While I like much of your and Mantis's) ideas here, I'm pretty
sure that Nessus is more than a thousand years old and so
predates Typhon and the _Whorl_. (In fact, I think it's
_much_ more, but I can't recall a cite at present to prove
it.)


> >Now this would be a rather insane (and, as far as I
> >can tell) rather impossible way to build and "launch"
> >a ship as big as the Whorl (which seems to be too
> >massive to ever be "launched" from a planet).
> >Still...why is the wall miles high and spread so far
> >around the city?


I suspect that the Wall was originally built to contain damage in the
event of a crash (something Mantis tosses off below). It would be
miles high to limit the escape of hazardous materials (radioactives,
alien life spores, etc.) on the wind.

Pondering: There are a few things of BDO scale in the NS books. Some
of them are alive. Is there any connection between them and the
nonliving ones? Could the Wall (despite my, I think, convincing theory
above) have anything to do with them? Probably not; a wall isn't necessary
to keep them "out" since they can't walk abroad on land.


>Fact: the Walls pre-date the city.
>
>Fact: the city has been crawling upstream for a long time, so it has
>presumably entered the walls and taken up residence like a hermit crab
>moving into a found shell.

Question: Do we know that the Walls form a closed ... circle, or whatever?
Or are they open to the Sea? Or extend out into it? I don't recall Sev.
mentioning passsing through them as he comes up the river on _Samru_,
but my memory could well be faulty in this. Anyone recall such a thing?

H'mmm. If they aren't fully closed, that blows off the "containment" theory,
doesn't it?


>Fact: the citadel pre-dates the city, and the earliest name we have for it
>is the Old Port, iirc.

The Citidel was clearly the old spaceport, yeah.  I mean, that's why the
Towers are old spaceships, neh?


>So it probably was one of the ports from which
>people and materials where shuttled up to the Whorl (and that was
>relatively late in history -- the city was . . . approaching, but not there
>yet?

Umm, no. The towers were already towers in Typhon's time, if I'm not
totally mistaken; they take Sev to the Matachin in UotNS, don't they? I'm
pretty sure it's not a port anymore at that point. H'mm: does anyone
recall whether the city is surrounding the Citadel yet at that point? Or if
there's any indication?


>As for the why, who knows?  Gene Wolfe might not even know.  It is a Big
>Dumb Object that is an Enigma, with echos of the Tower of Babel and skiffy
>notions like a failed sky-elevator, or a blast-containment area for ships
>with radioactive exhaust, or a simple terrarium-type structure (an early
>Trantor-style "world building" module?) that never got its Buckydome roof,
>or just a super "particle accelerator."  IIRC it is a feature of the dying
>sun fictions (if not even the gothic before it?) to have gigantism like
>this.

Yes ... Aside from Vance, the other major "dying Earth" work would be
Aldiss' _Hothouse_, which has its share of biological gigantism -- the 
world-
banyan, the spiders that web the Earth to the Moon ...

Hey, now. It occurs to me, going waaaaaaaaaaay back to certain theories
about trees. Could _Short Sun_ (and especially Green) be related to
Aldiss' book in a way similar to _New Sun_'s relationship to Vance's?

--Blattid

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