(urth) Green is Urth Redux

[DAVID STOCKHOFF]

--- On Wed, 1/12/11, Lee Berman <severiansola at hotmail.com> wrote:

> From: Lee Berman <severiansola at hotmail.com>
> Subject: (urth) Green is Urth Redux
> To: urth at lists.urth.net
> Date: Wednesday, January 12, 2011, 8:04 AM
> 
> >David Stockhoff: But we could just as well posit that
> in Severian's "parallel" universe the moon is bigger.
>  
> Given Rudesind's words, this seems like the best
> interpretation of the text to me, with the fewest reader
> additions.

Of course, if you accept the Moon as having been torn from Earth, then a bigger Lune may require a smaller Urth. Ain't no free lunch!
  
> >You could say most of the same things about the Whorl;
> are there no forests there?
>  
> But Whorl forests are internal, as is the atmosphere. They
> are maintained by a functioning power source.
> From the outside, the Whorl shines with a white reflected
> light.
>  
> Lune's forests are external and it shines with reflected
> green light. There is no mention of a functioning
> power source to maintain the trees.
>  
> Hypothesis 1: Lune is Moon-sized and we can assume there is
> an unmentioned power source.
>  
> Hypothesis 2: Lune is Urth-sized and we can assume its
> forests are maintained by the same power source as
> Urth's forests- the sun.

Presumably the trees' photosynthesis is driven by the sun. But the Whorl indicates that, as Jeff rightly assumes, the whole panoply of Golden Age SF technology is available to attach to whatever unexplained phenomena we see, so domes are not a stretch. They would need power for air and water movement, cycling, scrubbing, etc. The larger the dome, maybe the more convection and flow will go on by itself, but in any case Lune must have access to power worth dozens of Whorls. As I think you noted, force fields are just as possible as domes; in fact, they are a non-reflective variation on domes that could conceivably cover the entire Brightside face in a single space. They would better explain how wild vegetation could spread across the face of Lune, since multiple domes suggest partition.

Incidentally, does anyone see any problems with the Moon getting either not enough or too much sun for photosynthesis? Could the Darkside be just as green as the Urth-facing side? It would make sense for system-incoming ships to dock there. Anyway, trees need some kind of barrier---glass or wet atmosphere---to survive sunlight.

Finally, I want to note the insertion of a hallmark Golden Age cliche into BOTNS: calling the Moon "Luna." I don;t know why, but many SF writers did that in the 1950s. "Port'o'Lune" is plainly derived directly from "Port of Luna," in a literary if not necessarily linguistic sense. I love this.