(urth) Tzadkiel/Melek Taus
David Stockhoff
dstockhoff at verizon.net
Wed Jul 14 05:28:23 PDT 2010
Good one!
I should say, not just "pulp cliches" but Golden Age of Science Fiction
cliches.
I think they are intended to suggest exactly the sense of "boyish"
wonder that they do in fact inspire---but looking back, not forward.
Gerry Quinn wrote:
>
> 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 of this outdated concept alongside a similar but distinct outdted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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