(urth) Green is Urth Redux

[David Stockhoff]

On 1/11/2011 6:31 PM, Jeff Wilson wrote:
> On 1/11/2011 4:13 PM, DAVID STOCKHOFF wrote:
>> You mean you don't see a difference?
>
> I'll bite, how are they different?
>
Short answer: forests are not domes. The word "forest" is not even 
suggestive of domes.

Long answer: The only way to connect forests to domes is to perform a 
series of backstory fill-ins of the sort that make up your argument. The 
textual evidence for this is is zero beyond "there are forests on Lune."

---Forests are wild, and the Forest of Lune is a metaphor for 
wildness/wilderness when Vodalus (of the Wood)  is imagined to be hiding 
among them. Domes are not wild. Why would you dome over the entire disk 
of Lune and let it go wild? (Who would smoke all that pot, even with the 
Port there?)

---The light of Lune is not flashing or sparkly but just green. Nor is 
there any observable intercedent, such as glass, between the myriad 
leaves and Urth. (Granted, any ancient Moon domes would be clean on the 
outside and probably dirty green on the inside. But still they leave no 
sign.)

---Domes don't mean anything without water and air, and all those domes 
and trees need lots of water and air. Some water could come from ice 
under the crust. Where would air come from? Basically, the dome theory 
is just an easier version of the same problems you'd face with a 
terraforming theory, except for the weak gravity being no longer a problem.

There are no other substantive references to Lune except that it has a 
busy port and that it is brighter when the New Sun comes. I checked.

I'm not saying your argument is invalid or that domes are less likely 
than somehow adding enough mass to the Moon to let it hold water and 
air. But we could just as well posit that in Severian's "parallel" 
universe the moon is bigger. Or we could posit that there is no 
explanation for it at all, because it doesn't need one.

But is it a foretaste of Green? Yes.


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