(urth) traveling north

[Jeff Wilson]

On 6/6/2010 7:30 PM, Jane Delawney wrote:
> Thanks Roy, however I'm still wondering a little, because of the
> frequently stressed similarity in terms of materials between the City
> Wall and the Citadel wall. While the City Wall is obviously a great deal
> more sophisticated than that of the Citadel (the City Wall is large
> enough to contain barracks for both human and alien soldiers, weapons
> emplacements, and presumably much more besides - it seems to be a 'city'
> of sorts in itself) the *materials* of which these walls are composed
> are very similar and must have been constructed using similar levels of
> technology.
>
> And the City Wall of Nessus is incontestably far far to the North
> (Severian's north :) ) of the Citadel, at Severian's time - yet the
> technology to build such a structure has not existed for millennia,
> indeed given the (apparent?) comparative levels of technology displayed,
> the City Wall could as well have been built *before* the wall of the
> Citadel as after.
>
> I guess the question is whether you believe the curtain wall of the
> Citadel represents an earlier version of the extreme high tech that
> build the Wall of Nessus, or whether the Citadel wall is a decadent
> version of the City Wall, built in the same unsmeltable metal but with a
> lower level of sophistication.

I don't think it's the technology so much as the shrunken labor and 
talent pool. There are gobs of still operable technology sitting around, 
but it's been at least millenia since there were enough people to 
supervise it all. Doubtless all the "secrets" are somewhere in the 
library, but nowhere near enough librarians to sort out the bits to 
parley or bootstrap the useful bits into making more useful again.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
IEEE Student Chapter Blog at
< http://ieeetamut.org >