(urth) This week in Google Alerts

[Craig Brewer]

Right. I get the concerns, but, at the same time, it seems like a lot of the reasons given for a particular timeline have an odd mix of "real" and "sf" science: for example, you're worrying about how long a black hole would take to slowly destroy a star. Fair enough. But we're also granting a science that can create black holes wherever they want, like in the middle of a burning sun. Why are some scientific "facts" hard and fast and others very loose?

I get the worries, though. It bugged me when I read that Wolfe said 20,000 years because the whole atmosphere of the book seemed millions of years to me, and the dying sun (artificially or not) confirmed that in my first sense of the story. Plus, the miners who dug through layers of culture seemed to require much more than thousands of years to really make that scene "wondrous" for me.

But, again, putting any actual number on this requires a lot of "IFs" and questionable assumptions, it seems. In the end, I prefer it to be "a really long time" and not knowing exactly is a more appropriate sense of history that Severian has throughout most of the book. This is one of those cases where I prefer it when the "clues" don't add up to a consistent picture.



________________________________
From: Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <danldo at gmail.com>
To: Craig Brewer <cnbrewer at yahoo.com>; The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
Sent: Wednesday, November 2, 2011 11:27 AM
Subject: Re: (urth) This week in Google Alerts

On Wed, Nov 2, 2011 at 9:25 AM, Craig Brewer <cnbrewer at yahoo.com> wrote:

> But the question it does beg to me seems to be that of why the Sun is dying.
> In 20,000 years, it wouldn't burn out naturally, right? And if it was
> artificial, then who/why? That seems to be the real issue of the time lag,
> and I think it's been hashed out here before.

We know that the Sun is not dying naturally, that a black hole has
been planted in it. But I believe that a few thousand years would be
too short a time for _that_ to make the described difference...though
Typhon says that it's happening faster than predicted, so current
theory is of relatively little value here.

-- 
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes
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