(urth) The green man is a fake

[Jeff Wilson]

On 1/17/2011 10:29 AM, Jerry Friedman wrote:
>> From: Jeff Wilson<jwilson at io.com>
>
>>
>> On 1/17/2011 12:27 AM, Jerry Friedman wrote:
>>>> From: Jeff Wilson<jwilson at io.com>
>>>
>>>> On  1/16/2011 10:07 PM, Lee Berman wrote:
>>> He says they've altered the  algae, so why wouldn't they have altered
>> themselves?
>>
>> They would, but not  more than the Author would consider repectful of the
>> Creator.
>
> Do we know that the green people or their creators share the Author's views
> of respect toward the Creator?  And do the various man-beasts show us the
> limits of that?  Wings the size of the anpiels' would be very handy for
> photosynthetic people.

I don't think those Smithian underpeople are supposed to represent 
movement toward the Christian ideal the way  the ideal green man concept 
is. And I don't think a guy who considers BEN HUR possibly disrepsectful 
for fictionalizing parts of the gospel is going to choose to depict the 
path to salvation as requiring people to forsake the form Christ gave 
them at the Creation and become gutless, leafy freaks.

>> But there seems to be something of a tradition  of enslaving green men as
>> captive oracles.
>
> That's a good point.  We could perhaps imagine that the others have had
> other purposes, such as carrying messages that will be believed when a
> cacogen wouldn't be.

Plausible, but that would again favor my idea that the Yesodis  use them 
as part of their master plot. Attuning them to the White Fountain gives 
them the run of human history and a certain amount of prehistory, but 
keeps them from being able to accidentally step on the wrong butterfly 
in the Jurassic or prevent the formation of life itself.

>> And why can't he be authentic and  still be put in  Severian's path, eh?
>
> Because of all the things we've been discussing: He should be a darker
> color and have a different appearance (rather like an inhumu--just
> kidding), and there's not enough energy in sunlight.

We can't discount things with bogus physical explanations as fake; 
flyers still fly despite anti-iron having positive mass, and the Ship 
still flies to the end of the universe despite relativity and the light 
sails' abysmal thrust.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
Computational Intelligence Laboratory - Texas A&M Texarkana
< http://www.tamut.edu/CIL >