(urth) Like a good Neighbor

[Gerry Quinn]

From: Lee Berman 


> > Gerry Quinn: Wolfe plays fast and loose with the laws of physics when it suits the story.

> Actually, he doesn't. He is as meticulous as he can be. In this case it is completely 
> unnecessary for inhumi to fly through space. And they don't. Wolfe would not give us such
> an implausible scientific impossibility unless there was a desperate need for it in the
> story. And there isn't. The way inhumi travel through space is shown: on spaceships, using 
> deception to stow away in one form or another. 
Even if that’s correct, what difference does it make?  It does suggest, I suppose, that humans on Blue have less to worry about than they might have thought, given that their collapsing tech level will soon render space flight very rare or non-existent, and assuming that inhumi can indeed breed only on Green.
If they can breed on Blue, it makes no difference at all unless they can be exterminated there.
Personally I think they can fly through space.  Wolfe often uses cool but physically implausible ideas, even when they are not strictly necessary to the story.  And the spaceship theory doesn’t explain why they appear in increased numbers on Blue during Conjunction.  While it might save fuel, there’s no indication that many ships are launched then.  In fact they wouldn’t be, there is more to worry about.

> Raising the possibility of their unassisted space travel is used to illustrate the power of 
> lying, not to encourage fantastic, non-texual biological impossibilities. The inhumi need 
> this secret to be well-kept or they will lose the vital element of deceit they need to get 
> onto spaceships.

But spaceflight is almost dead anyway.
 

> Listen to yourself, Gerry. You are inventing rotissirie chicken spinning in space and >insulated, radiation-proof hard shells from nothing. And for what? To allow the inhumi to not >be liars, when they are all, without exception, demonstrable liars.

Liars do not lie all the time, as Dorcas points out.  And the things I invented are just the ordinary methods our primitive satellites use. 


> If there is a grain of truth in their lies about them flying in space during the 
> conjunction it is that they ride on short-distance landers which rely on the 
> conjunction for the shortest travel path.

Are you saying inhumi have their own landers?  Of course they have captured one, but it seems improbable that they have much of a space fleet. 


> FWIW, Juturna is also a liar. The passage suggests it by conflating her statement 
> with those of Baldanders and Talos. Her lying is supported by the appearance of 
> Idas on the Ship. She is cellular, thus she does not "swim between the stars" unassisted, 
> like a mini-spaceship. If pinned down, perhaps she would explain that swimming 
> between the stars is a poetic way of saying she can travel through time, "in the 
> spaces between stars" i.e. space-time. Or something like that.

I am not so certain.  If she can allow Severian to breathe underwater with a kiss, perhaps by expressing nanobots which will create gills for him, as the Mother somehow created gills for Seawrack, she may well be able to adapt to periods in vacuum without difficulty.  Of course, neither ability is proven, but neither is disproven either.  Erebus and Abaia may be post-Singularity beings of almost unimaginable capabilities, and some of these capabilities may be loaned to their more senior slaves.
 

> This leaves Tzadkiel's space-borne image in the mirror book to consider. Her self-
> description of her sponge-like character seem to suggest she is cellular in nature.
>  So what gives with the outer space Tzadkiel? My interpretation is that image was
>  Tzadkiel's true essence.  He/She is, in essence, spiritual only, not biological, as 
>  befits an angel. Tzadkiel, like angels, only takes a biological form when he/she
>  needs to interact with others of that type.      

So Wolfe sticks rigorously to physics, except when he doesn’t?

- Gerry Quinn

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