(urth) do the Hierogrammates *care* about the megatherians?

[Jeff Wilson]

On 5/20/2011 8:46 PM, Gerry Quinn wrote:
> I'm not sure there's much to read into this though. At the end of the
> day Wolfe wanted a dramatic and catastrophic effect. Current physics
> does not really justify it - for me the best solution is some unknown
> technology related to the transport of the White Fountain, which results
> in the emission of strong gravitational waves as it deccelerates near
> the end of its journey. But even these have problems because of poor
> coupling - by which I mean that the frequency that rings bells is too
> high to be easily absorbed by oceans.

	I am working from what seems to be the scenario best supported by the 
textev and criticism that says the general scheme of the BOTNS is a 
combination of older SF tropes "updated" by the physics and popular 
science of the late 1970s then tarted up in fantastic drag. That being, 
one or more black holes in the sun, siphoning off matter and energy 
through Einstein-Rosen bridge wormholes to Abaddon, while the White 
Fountain is similarly a white hole delivering matter and energy siphoned 
from Yesod via an artificial (as all massive objects in Yesod are) black 
hole.
	This comes in at an angle that shakes up Urth and creates a Flood 
because it inherits that from _WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE_ and "Born of the 
Sun" and other world-shaking astro-apocalyptic SF, as well as fulfilling 
the the mythic deluge parallels, and it advances the agenda of the 
Yesodis, who would not bother with such an undertaking simply to prolong 
the state of affairs on Urth, but instead required a new start for human 
civilization in order to have an additional chance of re-evolving the 
vanished Hieros that begat them.
	And it turns out that the bells are jingling because they are sewn to a 
curtain that is being disturbed by Severian and the assassin; they are 
being rung by the White Fountain, but by the figurative instrument of 
its personification rather than its gravity ripples.

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