(urth) Travelling North aka miscellaneous thoughts on Wolfe

[Eugene Zaretskiy]

On Mon, Jun 7, 2010 at 2:55 PM, Gerry Quinn <gerryq at indigo.ie> wrote:
>
> I don't think so.   To travel to Yesod it is necessary to break the laws of
> physics in Briah by travelling faster than light (though the mechanism
> proposed, tacking across the light from the stars, is cute but unfeasible).

I don't mean to pick on you, but I've always thought these types of
statements were quite presumptive. Yours is a common argument to make
against many ideas presented in science fiction. Educated folk mere
decades ago explained in simple science why some of the technologies
available today would be impossible to make. Yet the ingenuity of the
modern inventor constantly foils such assumptions. I'm sure you could
point out the fallacy in their thinking, but the fact remains that
countless millennia have passed between now and the time these ships
were "invented" (assuming someone, at some point, had to come up with
the technology). Are you absolutely certain that it simply isn't
possible that Severian's one-line explanation of how the ship sails is
accurate?

Not that it really matters. I just think it's rather groundless to
predict that a proposed method of travel used millennia from now is
unfeasible when we can't even predict what the weather tomorrow will
be.

>
> - Gerry Quinn
>
>
> From: "James Wynn" <crushtv at gmail.com>
>
>
>> I guess I thought that Yesod was a megauniverse with Briah being
>> equivalent to a planet within it? Is that wrong?
>>
>> On 6/7/2010 7:39 AM, Gerry Quinn wrote:
>>>
>>> You're right - I got them back to front.
>>>
>>> But I still think Yesod and Briah are different universes, not the same
>>> univese at different times.
>>>
>>> - Gerry Quinn
>
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-- 
Eugene Z
http://blog.eugenez.net