(urth) Tzadkiel/Melek Taus

[Gerry Quinn]

Baldanders has an anti-gravity belt too.

- Gerry Quinn


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "David Stockhoff" <dstockhoff at verizon.net>
To: "The Urth Mailing List" <urth at lists.urth.net>
Sent: Wednesday, July 14, 2010 12:32 PM
Subject: Re: (urth) Tzadkiel/Melek Taus


>I always suspected Wolfe of deliberately using pulp cliches in BotNS. I 
> had no idea he applied the principle so thoroughly. It almost has the 
> effect of reading about ancient, clever technologies like ballistae and 
> water clocks.
> 
> Jeff Wilson wrote:
>>
>> 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 Wolfe's deliberate use of this outdated 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.
>>
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