(urth) Tzadkiel/Melek Taus
Jeff Wilson
jwilson at io.com
Tue Jul 13 21:05:59 PDT 2010
On 7/13/2010 9:53 PM, Cliff Judge wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 13, 2010 at 5:05 PM, Cliff Judge <transentient at gmail.com
> <mailto:transentient at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> > Thanks for bringing this up, this gives me some food for thought
> with regard
> > to the "down is up" thing I am on about lately.
> >
> > E.g. Typhon throws Severian into the sled, they plummet
> downwards, then
> > arrive at the very top of Typon's mountain fastness, and Severian
> asks
> > Typhon how they could have come up so high, when they had just
> fallen so
> > far.
>
> If I remember correctly, the Autarch's craft employs "anti-iron" as
> some sort of contra-terrene matter that repels gravity. Maybe this
> sled is made of such stuff and they are facing backwards?
Typhon responds, "Why should gravity serve Urth, when it can serve
Typhon?" I interpret this as an adjustable antigravity effect, where the
sled and Severian's viscera fall freely as the acceleration of gravity
is reversed, then restored just in time for the sled to cease rising at
its destination and then lock in place. The flier's buoyancy seems to be
always present, but uses conventional action-reaction propulsion to
move, causing the screaming noise that accompanies the hasty departure
of of Vodalus , and explaining why people riding in them don't feel as
though they are falling.
Reverse-matter buoyancy has made something of a comeback with Robert L.
Foreward's notion of "negative mass", but at the time gravity-reversal
of antimatter was an obsoleted SF device since word had gotten around
the readership that antimatter was only electrically reversed, not
gravitationally. Wolfe's deliberate use of this outdated concept
alongside a similar but distinct outdted antigravity concept makes me
wonder if the mirror-traveling trick of accelerating light and the
reflected objects across or beyond the universe was also a plot device
previously used band then discarded by previous authors.
--
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
IEEE Student Chapter Blog at
< http://ieeetamut.org >
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