(urth) "been teaching literature for over 35 years"

[Jerry Friedman]

> From: António Pedro Marques <entonio at gmail.com>

> No dia 06/09/2013, às 21:52, Sergei SOLOVIEV <soloviev at irit.fr> escreveu:
>>  To me one of the strongest points that can be used to rebuff Cook (who 
>> really seems to me a pompous idiot)
>>  is that most of the answers can be found in BOTNs itself - like Lune (the 
>> moon) he overlooked.
>> 
>>  I think one of the aspects of the world described by Wolfe is loss of 
>> memory/unreliability of information
>>  Severian gets from others. Not long before, in times of Typhon, scientific 
>> information was much
>>  more available. So, why should we/he believe that plate tectonics and 
>> volcanism really stopped?
>>  And if it stopped, why? Maybe Erebus, Abaia etc; have their role in that? 
>> Who knows where  (how deep) their roots now are?

Or whether they have roots?

>> But this fuzzy world picture is part of what Wolfe describes!
> 
> The person in question seems simple enough to think that if a character tells us 
> some factoid about their world, then it must be so.

Well, he might justifiably ask, if Wolfe intended plate tectonics to exist on Urth, how it makes the book better for Severian to tell us that it stopped.  To improve the dying-earth atmosphere?

>>  And poor Cook thinks that our actual theories (like plate tectonics 
> recycling CO2) are absolute truth?
> 
> In that, alas, he is not alone. There are plenty of folks who think 
> 'science' has got it all figured out. Usually, it's people who know 
> very little of 'science' but like it a lot anyway.

It's hard to dispute that plate tectonics recycles CO2, since carbonate-containing rocks get subducted close to volcanoes that discharge CO2.  The part that science might not have completely figured out is whether there are or could be other recycling mechanisms.  Indeed, presumably with the genetic engineering that created the anpiels and dog-men and so forth, previous ages could have developed organisms that release CO2 from calcium carbonates on the ocean floor.

Jerry Friedman