message 0645

;From: nancy ott <ott@ansoft.com>
;Subject: cherryhlist
;Date: Fri, 29 Oct 93 12:08:15 EDT

>> Now, where did the other carriers go?
> Anyone want to do a quick head-count? Who's left? Once we have
> numbers we can think of ideas...
 
>Six left Pell at the end of DS, India was two riders short. There should
>have been four lonely riders insystem unless they were killed without
>mentioning it. India was probably lost with all hands in RR, and Australia
>lost some or all troops in ML.

A while back, someone brought up the reference that the humans had
been a "long time problem" to the mahendo'sat.  This might indicate
that one or more Mazianni carriers had penetrated mahen space and were
causing trouble there.  Then again, it could just mean that the
mahendo'sat had been picking up Earth TV/radio transmissions for a
while (it was specifically mentioned that they were listening for such
from other species) and were't sure what to do.  I imagine that all
those episodes of I Love Lucy, the Love Boat and Dallas -- not to
mention MTV, Howard Stern and the Republican National Convention --
would give them a pretty strange impression of the human race.

Perhaps someday Union will stumble upon a star system with a hulk of a
carrier in orbit and a small colony of *very* bitter Mazianni
descendants.....but I tend to think most of the Mazianni were taken
out in individual actions in Union and Alliance space.

It's also mentioned in "Cyteen" that the Mazianni might have had a
secret supply base at old Beta station, but nobody seemed to have ever
gone there to check out the rumor (logical enough if there are thought
to be several Mazianni carriers lurking about).  Still, one would
think that the chance to mop up Mazian's fleet and eliminate his
supply line would be tempting enough to create a joint
Union/Earth/Alliance task force and simply overwhelm them .....

> ;From: "Nancy Silberstein" <silbersteinn@a1.mscf.upenn.edu>
> ;Subject: Cherryhlist\31Aug93 et al

> On 10 October, Jo said something to the effect that all our arguments back 
> and forth help everyone to form their own opinions...and I agree. (Or, as a 
> deconstructionist acquaintance of mine says, "Everybody's reading is a 
> misreading.")  In my case, however, it is a consolation to know that my 
> befuddlement over some of the techie stuff is just not my lack of 
> knowledge.  Obviously, all is not always clear. Does technical fuzziness 
> interfere with your enjoyment of these works?  It doesn't with mine, but 
> then I tolerate a high magic/understanding ratio in my daily life already 
> - I'm on shaky grounds objecting to it in fiction.  For example, I don't 
> understand electricity, a cornerstone of modern life. If electricity falls 
> into the "magic" category, it is hard to balk at docking procedures.

I like your electricity analogy.  I'm not a big "hard SF" fan, and my
tolerance for "magic tech" and science mistakes depends on how well
the author has handled the other elements of the novel.  I like to see
that writers have done their basic physics homework, but I'll overlook
errors if they've presented a good story.  For instance, I enjoyed
Dickson's "Time Storm" even though he got the concept of entropy
backwards -- it was well written, I felt I could connect with the
characters, and in most other respects his concept was nicely
executed.  However, if the story is lousy, I tend to start picking the
science apart.  To paraphrase Tolkien, I will suspend my disbelief,
but I'm not going to hang, draw and quarter it.

In Cherryh's case, jump is the big "magic tech" item, and for the most
part, it's presented in a logical, consistent and believable manner.  I
usually enjoy her stories enough to overlook some of the smaller
mistakes (like gravity differentials in rotating ring spaceships and
docking problems).  The factual content of her stories has improved
over the years, too (compare "Heavy Time" to "Hestia", for instance).

I get kind of irritated at purists who insist that *everything* in SF
be absolutely factual and consistent with known technology.  (I guess
it depends on whether you interpret the "S" in SF as "speculative" or
"science".)  I once read a novel that was written in the early 50's by
a guy who was obviously a vacuum tube engineer, the title of which
escapes me.  It was your basic interplanetary saga in which
everything was an application of vacuum tube technology (and indeed
the plot centered around a limitation of vacuum tubes).  A few years
later, the transistor was invented and the poor guy's technical
masterpiece was consigned to oblivion.  Ditto with the "Venusian
swamp" and "Martian Canal" sagas after NASA's missions to Mars and
Venus.  

Though this tends to be one of the hazards of the genre, I'd hate to
see *all* of SF rendered obsolete by the next big technical
breakthrough.  

- nancy

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